Toni Morrison And The Bible

This collection of essays critically interrogates Toni Morrison's use of the Bible in her novels, examining the ways in which the author plays on the original text to raise issues of spirituality as it affects race, gender, and class. Ideal for courses on Morrison or on explorations of the intersection of religion and literature, this collection treats its topic with sophistication, considering «religion» in its broadest possible sense, and examining syncretic theologies as well as mainstream religions in its attempt to locate Morrison's work in a spiritual-theological nexus.

Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks an oft-ignored but essential element of her work--her religion--and in so doing gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. Nadra Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR MARLON JAMES Soon after a local eccentric leaps from a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Macon 'Milkman' Dead III is born. Brought up by his well-off black family to revere the white world around him, Milkman strives to make sense of his conflicting identities. Always seeking flight in some way, he leaves his Michigan home for the South, retracing the steps of his forebears in search of his own buried heritage and is introduced to an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins; the inhabitants of a fully realised black world. Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Song of Solomon is a brilliantly imagined coming-of-age tale.

Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the “great code” of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard discusses how such texts respond as a collective “literary witness” to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.

"Intricately Connected contains academic papers presented by Kim at various international conferences in the fields of biblical studies, literary criticism, and intertextuality. The articles examine the question of how various literatures connect to consciousness and culture at personal and collective levels. The focus is on the functionality of literature across time and space and addresses such questions as: How do later books of the Bible, such as Jeremiah, utilize consciousness and ideas from earlier times, such as those found in the book Deuteronomy? How does Toni Morrison link African-American experience of today with experience of slavery hundreds of years ago? How does the film Da Vinci Code (2006) assess and manipulate the received tradition of the Lord's Supper?"--BOOK JACKET.

How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

The new novel from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the centre: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish.... Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother ... Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother ... and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."