Literature Review on Morrison’s Beloved From the Perspective of New Historicism

As one of the most formally sophisticated novelists in the history of African American literature, Toni Morrison (1931-) has exerted vibrating influence upon the literary world. Her achievement in literature marks another monument in African American literature after the summit reached by Richard Wright (1908-1960) and Ralph Ellison (1914-1994). Beloved (1987), Morrison’s masterpiece, deals with the legacy of slavery in its depiction of a runaway slave’s struggle to claim the freed self. Since its publication, Beloved has inspired a considerable quantity of reviews, essays and book-length studies on various subjects with different critical methodologies both at home and abroad. Through analyzing these studies on Beloved, it can be found that part of Morrison’s project in Beloved is to subvert the mainstream white culture’s tampering of the black culture, restore their survival condition, and reconstruct the marginalized black history. Her unique way of dealing with history in fiction and the relationship between history and fiction coincides with the core of New Historicism.