Precious Wreckage: Characteristics of the Genre:

Monday, December 19, 2011

Characteristics of the Genre:

As a contemporary novel, Beloved also resembles the ghost story, a mystery, and a work of historical fiction. Morrison's novel is steeped in popular black culture, its music and folklore. Her novels juxtapose and combine joy and pain, laughter and tears, and love and death. These same combinations are the essence of blues, jazz, and spirituals.The tradition of black female writers is also a strong factor-Phyllis Wheatley and Lucy Terry (1st published black females in America who were also slaves), Zora Neale Hurston ( Harlem Renaissance) and Maya Angelou and Alice Walker (Women's Rights Movement and Black Rights Movement). She relies heavily on both oral tradition, and the slave narrative. Writing in the 20th Century, Toni Morrison's purpose is still a corrective one: the history of slavery must not be forgotten. Her purpose is to 'fill in the blanks that traditional slave narrative left.'

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About the Author

Toni Morrison birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, she was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio she was the second of four children of George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents had moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. She attended an integrated school, in the first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She later went to Howard University in Washington D.C. and graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English, then later attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955. She later married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect she was married in 1958, and had two sons Harold and Slade, then later divorced in 1964. She has many novels including "The Bluest Eye" in 1970, "Sula" in 1973 and "Song of Solomon" in 1977 and then "Beloved" in 1987 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison taught English at two branches of the Sate University of New York. And was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of at Albany. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, she held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. And she is currently a member of the editorial board of "The Nation" magazine.