Shaping Literature

Introduction

American author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In her work Toni Morrison has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. In the centre of her complex and multilayered narratives is the unique cultural inheritance of African-Americans(Bouson, 14). Morrison has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Discussion

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, where her parents had moved to escape the problems of southern racism. Her family were migrants, sharecroppers on both sides. Morrison grew up in the black community of Lorain. She spent her childhood in the Midwest and read voraciously, from Jane Austen to Tolstoy(David, 100). Morrison's father, George Wofford, was a welder, and told her folktales of the black community, transferring his African-American heritage to another generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., America's most distinguished black college.

There she changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni", explaining once that people found "Chloe" too difficult to pronounce. She continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Morrison wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and VirginiaWoolf, receiving her M.A.

Morrison's novels have been almost universally praised by reviewers, and have been the subject of numerous academic books and essays in the fields of gender studies, ethnic studies, postmodern theory, literary theory, and cultural studies. Many critics praised Morrison's complex treatment of issues of African-American identity in her novels(Bloom, 12). Gurleen Grewal expressed Morrison's concern with African-American identity throughout her oeuvre in stating, “African Americans must negotiate a place for themselves within a dominant culture; how they situate themselves with respect to their own history and culture is a pervasive ...