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Book Cover for: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Toni Morrison

Paperback
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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 Morri

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Jul 27th, 1993
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.10in - 0.40in - 0.20lb
  • EAN: 9780679745426
  • Categories: • American - African American & Black• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - American - African American & Bl• Discrimination

About the Author

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

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Book Cover for: A Mercy, Toni Morrison
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Book Cover for: Paradise, Toni Morrison
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Book Cover for: Love, Toni Morrison
Book Cover for: Home, Toni Morrison
Book Cover for: Toni Morrison Box Set: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Toni Morrison
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Book Cover for: A Toni Morrison Treasury: The Big Box; The Ant or the Grasshopper?; The Lion or the Mouse?; Poppy or the Snake?; Peeny Butter Fudge; The Tortois, Toni Morrison
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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Kim Scott 🇺🇦 #BLM
Kim Scott 🇺🇦 #BLM
@kimballscott
3 years

Kim Scott is an author and CEO coach.

Just read @chafkin's book on Thiel. Made me think of this line from Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison. “feeling within himself a sense of authority autonomy he had no known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of others.”

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Jason Stanley
@jasonintrator
2 years

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy.

“Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly.” - Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

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jourdain
@judysquirrels
2 years

Jourdain Searles is a writer, comedian and podcaster.

intro w/ 7 books the color purple (alice walker) play it as it lays (joan didion) playing in the dark (toni morrison) their eyes were watching god (ZNH) the devil finds work (james baldwin) the bloody chamber (angela carter) bastard out of carolina (dorothy allison) https://t.co/mSy9OXjVnt

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Praise for this book

"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." --Chicago Tribune

"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer." --The New York Times Book Review

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