The Critical Field

In an introductory book of this kind, it is neither possible nor helpful to attempt a comprehensive overview of the copious and always-growing scholarship on Morrison’s work. What follows is a broad account of key lines of inquiry and of dispute in the critical field, arranged by decade from the 1970s to the present day. The “story” of Morrison criticism has not, of course, followed a logical, systematic progression, and nor is it characterized by the predominance of any one approach over another. It is always related to broader developments in the fields of race, gender, comparative literary studies, and many others, and for this reason this section of the book is best read not in isolation but together with Chapter 3, “Contexts,” and with the account of Morrison’s criticism of her own work (and that of others) in Chapter 2. In the “Guide to Further Reading” I have listed (with full bibliographical information) all the essay collections, journal articles, and monographs quoted in this section, together with general recommendations. Page references for quotations from the works listed there are cited parenthetically in this text.

The 1970s

In the introduction to Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches (1997), Nancy Peterson gives a useful account of the earliest scholarly responses to Morrison. The first academic article on Morrison was published in the fall of 1975 in a now-defunct journal, Studies in Black Literature; it is Joan Bischcoff’s “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted Sensitivity” (Peterson, Toni 3). This article, like several of the earliest mainstream reviews of The Bluest Eye and Sula reprinted in the Gates and Appiah collection, Toni Morrison Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), struggles to reconcile Morrison’s specific focus on African-American experience with her universalism. A white Euro-American subject position is assumed in these early responses, to which Morrison’s concerns are always cast as relative. Sarah Blackburn writes in the New York Times of Sula, for example, that “one continually feels its narrowness, its refusal to brim over into the world outside its provincial setting,” and that the author is “far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life” (Gates and Appiah 8).