Full name: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Author: Toni Morrison Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Essays, Feminism Culture: African-American Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780679745426 0679745424

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race. Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent 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. Similar books: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin The Irresponsible Self by James Wood Fiction and the Figures of Life by William H. Gass On Literature by Umberto Eco Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov The Broken Estate by James Wood A Temple of Texts by William H. Gass The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson A Scream Goes Through the House by Arnold Weinstein The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward The origin of others by Toni Morrison The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde Not That Bad by Roxane Gay Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West