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  • Guest Editors' Introduction:Toni Morrison: New Directions
  • Kathryn Nicol (bio) and Jennifer Terry (bio)

This special issue of MELUS reflects a rich and wide-ranging field and an international research conversation that is currently occurring on the writing and position of Toni Morrison. It aims to generate discussion about the entire breadth of Morrison's work, considered in the context of the mature stage of her literary career, the large body of criticism her work has inspired to date, and this point in United States—and global—history. We are interested in exploring responses to Morrison's work now, particularly in the wake of A Mercy (2008), a text that almost from the moment of its issue has been identified as a watershed publication. The historical content of this novel combined with its apparent contemporary resonance in US culture and politics, coinciding with the election of Barack Obama, seems to have compelled readers and critics to reflect anew on Morrison's influ-ence and relevance as an artist and public intellectual. We hope here to locate and investigate a significant critical juncture in the author's diverse output and reception and to initiate new approaches and directions in Toni Morrison studies. The essays and reviews consider Morrison as a writer in multiple genres who speaks to multiple audiences; the issue therefore illustrates not only how her presence has reshaped US literature, but also her wider impact and appeal and the increasing transnationalism of her engagements and of scholarly dialogues about her work.1

Most of the articles retain a focus on Morrison's novels, but the author's short fiction and picture books for children also receive close attention. Issues of reception are addressed by Jessica Wells Cantiello, who scrutinizes A Mercy and how the novel has been reviewed, while Morrison's own critical commentary is central to Cynthia Dobbs's exploration of notions of "home" in Paradise (1997) and Sandra Kumamoto Stanley's reading of difference in terms of disability, drawing on the concept of an Africanist presence. The recent novels A Mercy and Paradise receive a variety of [End Page 7] treatments here, while Beloved (1987), Morrison's best known and most analyzed work to date, is approached from new directions by two of the articles. The review section picks up several of the threads found in the essays, featuring evaluations of book-length works of criticism published on Morrison in the last five years, a review of A Mercy, and two review essays that examine collections of the author's nonfiction commentary and student/teacher guides. Some of the reviews address recent comparative work on Morrison and other writers, and others assess scholarship that furthers the understanding of composite cultural and religious legacies in her oeuvre.

Doreen Fowler's "'Nobody Could Make It Alone': Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Beloved" opens up fresh lines of inquiry into familiar material. Significantly extending a field of criticism on Beloved that employs psychoanalytic discourse, Fowler focuses on a wide range of figures who perform a paternal function, exploring the depiction of processes of African American individuation, socialization, and attachment. Fowler draws on the theories of Julia Kristeva, Jessica Benjamin, and Hortense J. Spillers, arguing for the "critical role in Beloved of a father figure or third party in helping to form boundaries that both distinguish an autonomous subject and allow for alliances with others." Unlike previous analyses using similar frameworks, this essay turns from mother-child relations to find Morrison reconceptualizing the place of the paternal.

Another article revisiting Morrison's fifth novel is Mark Sandy's "'Cut by Rainbow': Tales, Tellers, and Reimagining Wordsworth's Pastoral Poetics in Toni Morrison's Beloved and A Mercy." Sandy's contribution offers a contrasting framework and approach that takes up Morrison's literary dialogue with and reworking of Romantic legacies. Interweaving readings of Wordsworth's verse, the poetry of Robert Frost and Derek Walcott, and both Beloved and A Mercy, Sandy offers a rich sense of Morrison's engagement "with a Romantic duality of vision that oscillates between nature's compensatory power and unsympathetic indifference to grief and loss." Exploring natural imagery, tales of marginality, obliteration and restoration, relations between...

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