Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Hardcover - 1992
by Toni Morrison
From the rear cover
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest". Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn.A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Details
- Title Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- Author Toni Morrison
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 110
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
- Date 05/01/1992
- Features Bibliography, Dust Cover
- ISBN 9780674673779 / 0674673778
- Weight 0.56 lbs (0.25 kg)
- Dimensions 8.57 x 5.72 x 0.68 in (21.77 x 14.53 x 1.73 cm)
- Reading level 1260
-
Themes
- Ethnic Orientation: African American
- Ethnic Orientation: Multicultural
- Library of Congress subjects Blacks in literature, African Americans in literature
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 91039671
- Dewey Decimal Code 810.980
Media reviews
Citations
- Booklist, 03/01/1992, Page 1163
- Library Journal, 05/01/1992, Page 0
- New Yorker (The), 12/03/2001, Page 96
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