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Reviewed by:
  • Beloved: Character Studies, and: Reading Toni Morrison, and: The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity
  • Rebecca White (bio)
Beloved: Character Studies. Nancy J. Peterson. New York: Continuum, 2008. 128 pages. $90.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
Reading Toni Morrison. Rachel Lister. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009. 153 pages. $35.00 cloth.
The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity. Ed. Jami L. Carlacio. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2007. 279 pages. $37.95 paper.

Nancy J. Peterson's Beloved: Character Studies, Rachel Lister's Reading Toni Morrison, and Jami L. Carlacio's The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Reading and Writing on Race, Culture, and Identity contribute to a growing body of Morrison scholarship produced as student guides and teaching aids. While each book follows similar patterns, structuring chapters around textual analysis and subsequent classroom discussion points, each holds its own significance and interest. Through negotiating the wide-ranging debates and theoretical approaches driving the field, the guides offer many nuanced interpretations of Toni Morrison as a novelist and as a cultural phenomenon, engaging students, teachers, and researchers alike.

Peterson's book is part of a series dedicated to promoting "sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character" (vi). Her work is a concise yet detailed guide to Beloved (1987), her astute analysis of Morrison's characterizations underpinned by a range of theoretical approaches and an informative exploration of historical context. As such, the book presents an expansive account of the literary text; as Peterson maintains, "Readers of the novel need as many perspectives as possible to tease out [its] haunting questions" (60).

The book stresses the complexities and ambiguities of the literary text and surrounding issues; although an accessible and succinct overview, it rests in no way upon simplification. Instead, Peterson's sustained analysis is driven by its questioning approach, encouraging critically engaged reading that is consolidated by the discussion points concluding each section. Although it seems at times that Peterson describes rather than [End Page 206] interrogates issues (stating rather than analyzing the differences between Margaret Garner's and Sethe's stories, for instance), she returns to such ideas through the concluding questions, encouraging readers to evaluate the text themselves; like Morrison's own refusal in Beloved to elucidate her work for readers searching for "a truth for all times" (35), Peterson does not simply provide answers. Useful as prompts for classroom debate, essays, or revision, the discussion points reassert and develop the ideas raised throughout the book while also drawing connections between chapters. Highlighting the novel's complexity and the significance of various disciplinary perspectives, they reinforce learning by encouraging an inquisitive rereading of both Morrison's and Peterson's texts.

The introduction and Chapter One outline Beloved's origins and in clude a summary of Morrison's life and career. An overview of Morrison's novels prior to A Mercy (2008) is also presented, contextualizing Beloved while establishing its significance. Chapter Two develops the book's introductory comments about gender, proposing distinctions between motherhood and mothering and drawing upon "black feminist theory . . . to show the violence done to mothering by slavery" (29). Again, Peterson's nuanced observations are integrated with those of other critics, providing a useful scholarly framework. This multiplicity of perspective is extended in Chapter Three, which encourages an appreciation of the many interpretations of Beloved as a character and a symbol. Chapter Four re-addresses critical tendencies that contend that "Morrison is much more attentive to the plight of African American women in Beloved than to the plight of black men" (62); the discussion points here also raise questions about black masculinity as represented in Jonathan Demme's film adaptation of Beloved (1998). Peterson's broad approach to Morrison's novel is consolidated by Chapter Five, with an examination of the text's complex portrayal of "the operations of white privilege" and ideology (79). A concluding chapter reiterates the issues explored throughout the book, demonstrating that character can be used as a lens through which the multiple influences energizing Morrison scholarship—including African American studies, feminism, postcolonialism, and American studies—are appreciated and analyzed.

As Peterson argues, this "approach...

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