Research Catalog

Title

Beloved : a novel / by Toni Morrison.

Author

Morrison, Toni

Publication

• New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
• New York : Distributed by Random House, Inc.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

275 pages; 24 cm

Summary

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future.

Subject

• African American women > Ohio > Fiction
• African American mothers > Fiction
• Mothers and daughters > Fiction
• Enslaved women > Fiction
• Infanticide > Fiction
• Haunted places > Ohio > Fiction
• African Americans
• Ghost stories
• Literature, Modern
• Black or African American
• Race Relations
• African American
• African American mothers
• African American women
• Ghost stories
• Haunted places
• Infanticide
• Mothers and daughters
• Enslaved women
• Slavery > Fiction. > Ohio
• Ohio > Fiction
• United States
• Ohio

Genre/Form

• Domestic fiction.
• Fictional Work
• novels.
• Domestic fiction
• Fiction
• Historical fiction
• Novels
• Historical fiction.
• Novels.
• Romans.

Contents

Introduction / Harold Bloom -- Haunted by Their Nightmares / Margaret Atwood -- Toni Morrison's Beloved / Roger Sale -- A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Marilyn Sanders Mobley -- Beloved and the New Apocalypse / Susan Bowers -- Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved / David Lawrence -- Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past / Bernard W. Bell -- Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos -- Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Linda Krumholz -- Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in Beloved / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese -- Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved / Ashraf H.A. Rushdy -- Beloved: Toni Morrison's Post-Apocalyptic Novel / Josef Pesch -- Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, "Rememory," and a "Clamor for a Kiss" / Caroline Rody -- Ghosts of Liberalism: Morrison's Beloved and the Moynihan Report / James Berger -- Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved / Pamela E. Barnett.

ISBN

• 0394535979
• 9780394535975

LCCN

86046157

OCLC

• ocm15284982
• 15284982
• SCSB-1708601

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library