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Sites about Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an escaped slave and mother who is jailed for murdering one of her children.

Characters: Sethe, Beloved

Critical sites about Beloved

‘Beloved’: ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_1_33/ai_54421534

“The novel, ‘Beloved,’ by Toni Morrison presented the conflict of interpellating systems.”

Contains: Content Analysis,

Author: Arlene R. Keizer

From: African American Review Spring 1999

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Book Review:Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Book review which concludes that “Morrison extends a vision that moves beyond victimization for sectors of the black community unable to escape a gruesome past that won’t let go of their present like Beloved and Sethe wouldn’t let go of each other.”

Contains: Review

Author: Andrés T. Tapia

From: Inklings

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Looking into the self that is no self: an examination of subjectivity in ‘Beloved.’

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_n3_v32/ai_21232162

‘Toni Morrison’s novel ‘Beloved’ attempts to repress the memory of slavery while providing a space for Africans and African American slaves to gain subjectivity.”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Jennifer L. Holden-Kirwan

From: African American Review Fall, 1998

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Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_45/ai_61297795

“For Toni Morrison, an African American woman addressing a ‘dominant narrative’ in which black women have been secondary or invisible, ‘writing beyond the ending’ means interrogating the historical implications that romance assumes when infused with ideologies of race. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, intersecting narratives of romance and slavery lead to dual endings, which, in their refusal of resolution, represent the double dilemmas of divergent narrative perspectives and goals.”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Mary Paniccia Carden

From: Twentieth Century Literature Winter 1999

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Morrison’s Beloved: Allegorically Othering “White” Christianity

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_2_24/ai_59211510

This essay argues that “Morrison’s allegorical revision of the Song of Solomonand other Biblical passages constitutes what Stephen A. Barney, in Allegories of History,Allegories of Love, terms ‘other-speech,’ a type of minority discourse related to, but notsymptomatic of, the dynamics of religious and/or cultural ‘othering.'”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Peggy Ochoa

From: MELUS Summer, 1999

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“Postmodern blackness”: Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and the end of history

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_2_44/ai_53260178

“Literary critics point out that postmodern society and its literary products have negated the historical concepts of past and present.”

Contains: Historical Context

Author: Kimberly Chabot Davis

From: Twentieth Century Literature September 1998

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Remembering the Disremembered: Toni Morrison as Benjamin’s Storyteller

http://www.temple.edu/gradmag/fall97/nutting.htm

This graduate student essay uses “Beloved” as anexample to assert that Morrison is “a contemporary storyteller in the mode Benjamin defines. Her fiction is shaped from the traditions of her people and forms the rungs of the communal ladder of experience which she so freely moves up and down.”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Elizabeth Lofgren Nutting

From: Schuykill Fall 97

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The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_1_34/ai_62258906

“The search to find narrative methods that resist the totalizing impulse of narrative and of readers themselves is a central aspect of Morrison’s fictional technique, and is certainly connected to her investment in an oral, African American tradition of storytelling, of the Griot. Beloved (1987) marks the height of Morrison’s achievement, for it is a narrative that resists closure in numerous ways. I have found that for this reason teaching Beloved is always a new experience–no class reacts to it the same way, as it generates multiple ambiguities that cannot easily be sutured over. Yet in teaching this book, I am always surprised by how ready students are to resolve the issue of Beloved’s status in this novel, to decide unambiguously that she is a ghost–in fact, the ghost of the child Sethe killed eighteen years earlier. In my mind, however, the text balances between realistic explanations of Beloved’s presence (she is an escaped slave woman who has been sexually abused by a white man) and supernatural ones (she is Sethe’s dead child come back to haunt her), and is therefore an excellent example of what Tzvetan Todorov has called the fantastic. Why do students ignore the text’s balance between the realistic and the marvelous? And even more puzzling, why has this tendency to fix on a particular meaning for Beloved been replicated by literary scholars, most of whom view Beloved as a ghost?”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Martha J. Cutter

From: African American Review Spring, 2000

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Transforming the Chain into Story: The Making of Communal Meaning in Toni Morrison�s Beloved

http://www.janushead.org/JHSummer98/ClaireNBarbetti.cfm

“Beloved is about slavery. Its focus, however, is not on the socio-political dimension; rather, it enters into a realm of the spirit where the heart, not the intellect, must make sense of the painful past.”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Claire N. Barbetti

From: Janus Head http://members.tripod.com/~Janus_Head/jhtc.htm

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Violence, home, and community in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2_33/ai_55577123

‘The novel ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison illustrates both the dystopian and utopian characteristics of the home and community.”

Contains: Content Analysis

Author: Nancy Jesser

From: African American Review Summer, 1999

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Other (non-critical) sites about Beloved

Jaunted By Their Nightmares

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/8212.html

“Ms. Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ‘Beloved’ will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser.”

Contains: Review

Author: Margaret Atwood

From: The New York Times September 13, 1987

Author: Margaret Atwood

From: The New York Times September 13, 1987

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Last Updated Apr 29, 2013