num_pages: 104
description: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
language: English
title: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
titlecomplete: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
genres: Essays, Social Justice, Race, Criticism, Theory, African American, Feminism, Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism
ratings_count: 6569
series: The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies
publisher: Harvard University Press