Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
English | 1993 | ISBN: 0679745424 | 91 Pages | PDF | 17.7 MB
English | 1993 | ISBN: 0679745424 | 91 Pages | PDF | 17.7 MB
The Nobel Prize-winning author 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.