迷失与重建
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摘要
作为托尼·莫里森最重要的小说,《宠儿》一直被认为是直击问题实质的最“黑色”之书,也因此为莫里森在她作家生涯中赢得了很多赞扬和尊敬。《宠儿》以一个从前被奴役的女人的“杀婴事件”为中心,表面上看似讲述过度浓厚的母爱。然而,当读者探寻“杀婴事件”背后最本质的原因时,他们会发现“杀婴”其实是女主人公塞丝对惨无人道的奴隶制度的极度反抗,是她为了作为人的自我或者为了其身份的认同而作的一次绝望的斗争。
据此,本论文正是对《宠儿》中主要黑人女性身份作的一次完整探寻。鉴于奴隶社会黑人女性作为完整的个人身份一直受到白人殖民者的否认和异化,本论文作者将结合霍米?巴巴的“杂糅”和“矛盾情绪”理论以及格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“女混血儿意识”和“边缘地带”理论来探寻《宠儿》里主要黑人女性身份从缺失、觉醒到重建的艰辛漫长之路。本论文认为,《宠儿》里黑人女性的自我实现和其身份的重建是一个不断反抗殖民者将其身份定义为“物”的过程,并强调黑人女性身份的缺失、觉醒以及重建都无一不与她们各自的身体、姓名、对他人的爱,回忆以及她们所赖以生存的社区团体息息相关。总的说来,除了介绍和结语外,本论文主要包含以下三个部分。主要结构如下:
第一章主要从黑人女性的身体变形、名字缺失、爱的畸变等来讨论杂糅文化下黑人女性自我身份的缺失。第二章,结合巴巴的“杂糅”和“矛盾情绪”理论以及格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“女混血儿意识”,集中分析黑人女性对自我身份追寻意识上的觉醒,这些觉醒主要表现或者隐藏在她们不断反抗奴隶制对她们固定模式定义的行为中,如渴望获得爱、获得名字、害怕自我分解或者自救。第三章在格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“边缘地带”理论的帮助下,重点分析回忆(rememory)和黑人社区对塞丝及丹芙个人身份重建的重要性,并由此探索黑人民族身份重建的可能性。
本研究企盼能为该小说的研究再予一点启迪之光,并由此呼唤人们给予黑人女性以高度的人性关怀。作为一部“女混血儿意识”小说,该小说迫使读者不知不觉在众多回忆中穿越边界。通过瓦解民族历史强势话语,《宠儿》毫无疑问也是一种声音,并为殖民历史的子子孙孙提供了另一种可供选择的意识模式。
Regarded as the“darkest”novel that goes right to the heart of the matter, Tony Morrison’s Beloved is her most important novel and has won her much praise and honor during her career as a writer. Beloved tells a formerly enslaved woman’s attempt to kill all her children rather than see them enslaved in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law and thus is seemingly about excesses of mother love. Nevertheless, when probing into the fundamental causes of the infanticide’s, readers have to admit that it should attribute to Sethe’s radical resistance against the brutal slavery, and a desperate fighting for the self or the recognition of her identity as a human being.
Accordingly, this research bears a burden to quest for African-American female identity. Significantly, considering that their identity as full individuals has been consistently denied to them by white colonialists, this research will thus read black females’self-actualization from the point of view of Homi Bhabha’s“hybridity”and“colonial ambivalence”as well as Gloria Anzaldua’s“mestiza consciousness”and“borderland”, and will read it as a resistive process against objectifying colonial definitions of black identity. It further argues that the construction of black female identity has gone through a long way of sufferings and hardships, including both periods of loss and awakening, which are integrally intertwined with their body, name, love, community and their narrative of story-telling. Generally speaking, this research consists of three parts which comes between introduction and conclusion. It is structured as follows:
The first chapter mainly discusses the black women’s sufferings of transformation in their body, loss of name and deformed mother love that lead to a loss of the hybrid self. The second chapter focuses on black females’awakening which is shown or implied in their acts of resistance against the fixed definition of black women under slavery, in their desire for love and name, in their fear of disintegration, and in their acts of self salvation. The third chapter expounds on the importance of rememory and the key role the community plays in the reconstruction of Sethe’s identity and that of Denver, and finally the possible reconstruction of black national identity.
This research is expected to shed light on the researches of the novel and evokes people’s concern about black females’fate as human beings. As a mestiza text, the novel forces readers to cross borders through a definition of rememory. Beloved, then, is a“voice”that, by disrupting the dominant discourse of national history, serves as an alternative ideological model for all descendents of a colonialist history.
据此,本论文正是对《宠儿》中主要黑人女性身份作的一次完整探寻。鉴于奴隶社会黑人女性作为完整的个人身份一直受到白人殖民者的否认和异化,本论文作者将结合霍米?巴巴的“杂糅”和“矛盾情绪”理论以及格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“女混血儿意识”和“边缘地带”理论来探寻《宠儿》里主要黑人女性身份从缺失、觉醒到重建的艰辛漫长之路。本论文认为,《宠儿》里黑人女性的自我实现和其身份的重建是一个不断反抗殖民者将其身份定义为“物”的过程,并强调黑人女性身份的缺失、觉醒以及重建都无一不与她们各自的身体、姓名、对他人的爱,回忆以及她们所赖以生存的社区团体息息相关。总的说来,除了介绍和结语外,本论文主要包含以下三个部分。主要结构如下:
第一章主要从黑人女性的身体变形、名字缺失、爱的畸变等来讨论杂糅文化下黑人女性自我身份的缺失。第二章,结合巴巴的“杂糅”和“矛盾情绪”理论以及格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“女混血儿意识”,集中分析黑人女性对自我身份追寻意识上的觉醒,这些觉醒主要表现或者隐藏在她们不断反抗奴隶制对她们固定模式定义的行为中,如渴望获得爱、获得名字、害怕自我分解或者自救。第三章在格洛里亚?安让杜尔的“边缘地带”理论的帮助下,重点分析回忆(rememory)和黑人社区对塞丝及丹芙个人身份重建的重要性,并由此探索黑人民族身份重建的可能性。
本研究企盼能为该小说的研究再予一点启迪之光,并由此呼唤人们给予黑人女性以高度的人性关怀。作为一部“女混血儿意识”小说,该小说迫使读者不知不觉在众多回忆中穿越边界。通过瓦解民族历史强势话语,《宠儿》毫无疑问也是一种声音,并为殖民历史的子子孙孙提供了另一种可供选择的意识模式。
Regarded as the“darkest”novel that goes right to the heart of the matter, Tony Morrison’s Beloved is her most important novel and has won her much praise and honor during her career as a writer. Beloved tells a formerly enslaved woman’s attempt to kill all her children rather than see them enslaved in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law and thus is seemingly about excesses of mother love. Nevertheless, when probing into the fundamental causes of the infanticide’s, readers have to admit that it should attribute to Sethe’s radical resistance against the brutal slavery, and a desperate fighting for the self or the recognition of her identity as a human being.
Accordingly, this research bears a burden to quest for African-American female identity. Significantly, considering that their identity as full individuals has been consistently denied to them by white colonialists, this research will thus read black females’self-actualization from the point of view of Homi Bhabha’s“hybridity”and“colonial ambivalence”as well as Gloria Anzaldua’s“mestiza consciousness”and“borderland”, and will read it as a resistive process against objectifying colonial definitions of black identity. It further argues that the construction of black female identity has gone through a long way of sufferings and hardships, including both periods of loss and awakening, which are integrally intertwined with their body, name, love, community and their narrative of story-telling. Generally speaking, this research consists of three parts which comes between introduction and conclusion. It is structured as follows:
The first chapter mainly discusses the black women’s sufferings of transformation in their body, loss of name and deformed mother love that lead to a loss of the hybrid self. The second chapter focuses on black females’awakening which is shown or implied in their acts of resistance against the fixed definition of black women under slavery, in their desire for love and name, in their fear of disintegration, and in their acts of self salvation. The third chapter expounds on the importance of rememory and the key role the community plays in the reconstruction of Sethe’s identity and that of Denver, and finally the possible reconstruction of black national identity.
This research is expected to shed light on the researches of the novel and evokes people’s concern about black females’fate as human beings. As a mestiza text, the novel forces readers to cross borders through a definition of rememory. Beloved, then, is a“voice”that, by disrupting the dominant discourse of national history, serves as an alternative ideological model for all descendents of a colonialist history.
引文
1 Homi K. Bhabha (born 1949) is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language, and the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post-colonial studies, and has coined a number of the field’s neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised peoples have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha’s theory.
2 Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942– May 15, 2004) was considered a leading scholar of Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. She loosely based her most well-known book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border and incorporated her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into her works.
3 Hybridity, originally naming something or someone of mixed ancestry or derived from heterogeneous sources, has been employed in post-colonialism, particularly in the work of Homi Bhabha, to signify a reading of identities which foregrounds the work of difference in identity resistant to the imposition of fixed, unitary identification which is, in turn, a hierarchical location of the colonial or subaltern subject. In this research, it bears both negative and positive implications, but the focus should be the latter. Here it refers to the negative connotations argued by Robert Young and Derek Walcott.
4 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research P, 2000. The following page references in the parenthesis refer to the same book unless otherwise indicated.
5 Identity, one of the most central and most contested concepts in circulation today, has been a hot issue among African American people, especially among the women, arguably since the beginning of the slavery period. It’s true that every one has a unique identity, a core self which is consistent over time, and which defines the idea of your self. However, during slavery, African Americans owned nothing but negative experience on which they based their existence. In this research, identity is closely related to one’s selfhood, body, name, love, community and a link in the chain of tradition. It is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of it as an already accomplished fact, we should think of it as a“production”, which is never complete, always in process.
6 Robert Young is Silver Professor and Professor of English in Exeter College, Oxford. In different ways, his work has been primarily concerned with people and their cultures that exist or have existed on the margins and peripheries of society, whether nationally or globally. His areas of research include Postcolonial literatures and cultures, the history of colonialism and anti-colonialism, cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries and literary and cultural theory.
7 Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott’s life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. His most well known work includes the Homeric epic Omeros (1990) and the short poem“Love after love”.
8 Nan and Sethe’s mother are“shipmate”relatives, fictive kin whose source of connection is their experience of the Middle Passage. In a number of New World, African-descended cultures, these relationships were a very important source ofidentification and resistance for slaves.
9 Conventionally, the term Ambivalence signals powerful mutually contradictory feelings concerning a particular subject or the uncertainty arising from such an unresolved state. Employed in particular strands of postcolonial critical discourse and developed specifically from the work of Homi Bhabha, ambivalence in this context signifies the condition produced through the discourse of mimicry, whereby in the process of imposing on the colonial subject the desire to render that subject the same as the colonizer (for example, through the coloniser’s language), there is produced, says Bhabha, a difference, slippage or excess.
10 In her seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua constructs a mestiza consciousness as a dynamic“new mythos”capable of breaking down dualistic hegemonic paradigms. Anzaldua targets paradigms representing culturally determined roles imposed on individuals and peoples from the outside. Failure to conform to such paradigms, Anzaldua argues, results in the social ostracism of the“transgressors.”In constructing her compelling argument in Borderlands, Anzaldua creates a“mythos”of Mestizaje to explore and explode the ways in which socially enforced paradigms arc established through surface and conceptual metaphors as well as the ways in which these paradigms seem to label people as acceptable or unacceptable.
11 The“Coatlicue state”is when the mestiza experiences something similar to that of a womb of a woman, dark and isolated but with provisions for nourishment. This stage represents the increasing spiritual awareness. During this time, the person overcomes misleading reality to transcend rational thinking. The process to reach this stage is wrought with pain and challenges because the person needs to face her worst fears. She has to allow herself to be overcomed by them to realize that the demons she faced are where she will generate strength and power.
Abraham, Susan. Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Acheraiou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2008.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute, 1987.
Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel——Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2007.1.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place Within Community. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.
Bouson, Brooks. J. Quiet as it’s kept: Shame, trauma, and race in the novels of Toni Morrison. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Brown, Anne E and Gooze, Marjanne E, eds. International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. London: Greenwood P, 1995.
Chandra, Giti. Narrative Violence, Constructing Collective Identities:‘To Witness These Wrongs Unspeakable’. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Publish. Great Britain: CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne. Print.
Christian, Barbara.“Fixing Methodologies: Beloved.”Cultural Critique 24, 1993.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Though: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1993.
David, Paul A., et al. Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Edwards, Justin D. Postcolonial Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Graham, Maryemma ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. London: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
Groover, Kristina K. The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and the Spiritual Quest. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999.
Hedrick, Tace, and King, Debra Walker.“Women of Color and Feminist Criticism: The Theorizing Love.”Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Wolfreys, Julian, ed. Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2006, 10.
Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Kella, E. Beloved communities: Solidarity and difference in fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Joy Kogwana. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2000.
Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.
Kirwan, Holden and L, Jennifer.“Looking into the self that is no self: an examination of subjectivity in Beloved.”African American Review. 32.3 (Fall 1998). Literature Resource Center.
Maxwell, M. Male rage and female fury: Gender and violence in contemporary American fiction. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Otten, Terri. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia University: Pof Missouri, 1989.
Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. Hong Kong. Print, 2000.
Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A.“Daughters Signifying History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”American Literature 64, September, 1992.
Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction——Post-War Women Novelists. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992.
Shapiro, Barbara.“The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”Contemporary Literature 32.2 (1991).
Spillers, Hortense J.“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”Diacritics 17. 2. (1987).
Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Tang, Hongmei. Race, Sex and Cultural Identity: A Creative Study on American Black Female Writers: Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. The Ethnic Publishing House. Ethnic Studies Library: 0587620.
Wang, Shouren and Wu, Xinyun. Sex, Race and Culture: Toni Morrison’s Novel Creation. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004, 3.
West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
Wolfreys, Julian, and Robbins, Ruth and Womack, Kenneth. Key Concepts in Literary Theory (Second Edition). Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2006. 4.
Yang, Zhongju and Wang, Hongkun. Black Books: Morrison’s Novel Creation and Black Culture and Tradition. Beijing: Party Literature Research Press of the CPC Central Committee, 2007, 12.
Zhu, Rongjie. The Pain and Bridge: Cultural Studies on the Maternal Theme in Toni Morrison’sNovels. Kaifeng: Henan University Press, 2004, 12.
2 Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942– May 15, 2004) was considered a leading scholar of Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. She loosely based her most well-known book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border and incorporated her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into her works.
3 Hybridity, originally naming something or someone of mixed ancestry or derived from heterogeneous sources, has been employed in post-colonialism, particularly in the work of Homi Bhabha, to signify a reading of identities which foregrounds the work of difference in identity resistant to the imposition of fixed, unitary identification which is, in turn, a hierarchical location of the colonial or subaltern subject. In this research, it bears both negative and positive implications, but the focus should be the latter. Here it refers to the negative connotations argued by Robert Young and Derek Walcott.
4 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research P, 2000. The following page references in the parenthesis refer to the same book unless otherwise indicated.
5 Identity, one of the most central and most contested concepts in circulation today, has been a hot issue among African American people, especially among the women, arguably since the beginning of the slavery period. It’s true that every one has a unique identity, a core self which is consistent over time, and which defines the idea of your self. However, during slavery, African Americans owned nothing but negative experience on which they based their existence. In this research, identity is closely related to one’s selfhood, body, name, love, community and a link in the chain of tradition. It is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of it as an already accomplished fact, we should think of it as a“production”, which is never complete, always in process.
6 Robert Young is Silver Professor and Professor of English in Exeter College, Oxford. In different ways, his work has been primarily concerned with people and their cultures that exist or have existed on the margins and peripheries of society, whether nationally or globally. His areas of research include Postcolonial literatures and cultures, the history of colonialism and anti-colonialism, cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries and literary and cultural theory.
7 Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott’s life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. His most well known work includes the Homeric epic Omeros (1990) and the short poem“Love after love”.
8 Nan and Sethe’s mother are“shipmate”relatives, fictive kin whose source of connection is their experience of the Middle Passage. In a number of New World, African-descended cultures, these relationships were a very important source ofidentification and resistance for slaves.
9 Conventionally, the term Ambivalence signals powerful mutually contradictory feelings concerning a particular subject or the uncertainty arising from such an unresolved state. Employed in particular strands of postcolonial critical discourse and developed specifically from the work of Homi Bhabha, ambivalence in this context signifies the condition produced through the discourse of mimicry, whereby in the process of imposing on the colonial subject the desire to render that subject the same as the colonizer (for example, through the coloniser’s language), there is produced, says Bhabha, a difference, slippage or excess.
10 In her seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua constructs a mestiza consciousness as a dynamic“new mythos”capable of breaking down dualistic hegemonic paradigms. Anzaldua targets paradigms representing culturally determined roles imposed on individuals and peoples from the outside. Failure to conform to such paradigms, Anzaldua argues, results in the social ostracism of the“transgressors.”In constructing her compelling argument in Borderlands, Anzaldua creates a“mythos”of Mestizaje to explore and explode the ways in which socially enforced paradigms arc established through surface and conceptual metaphors as well as the ways in which these paradigms seem to label people as acceptable or unacceptable.
11 The“Coatlicue state”is when the mestiza experiences something similar to that of a womb of a woman, dark and isolated but with provisions for nourishment. This stage represents the increasing spiritual awareness. During this time, the person overcomes misleading reality to transcend rational thinking. The process to reach this stage is wrought with pain and challenges because the person needs to face her worst fears. She has to allow herself to be overcomed by them to realize that the demons she faced are where she will generate strength and power.
Abraham, Susan. Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Acheraiou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2008.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute, 1987.
Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel——Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2007.1.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2009.
Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place Within Community. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.
Bouson, Brooks. J. Quiet as it’s kept: Shame, trauma, and race in the novels of Toni Morrison. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Brown, Anne E and Gooze, Marjanne E, eds. International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity. London: Greenwood P, 1995.
Chandra, Giti. Narrative Violence, Constructing Collective Identities:‘To Witness These Wrongs Unspeakable’. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Publish. Great Britain: CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne. Print.
Christian, Barbara.“Fixing Methodologies: Beloved.”Cultural Critique 24, 1993.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Though: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1993.
David, Paul A., et al. Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Edwards, Justin D. Postcolonial Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Graham, Maryemma ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. London: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
Groover, Kristina K. The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and the Spiritual Quest. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999.
Hedrick, Tace, and King, Debra Walker.“Women of Color and Feminist Criticism: The Theorizing Love.”Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century. Wolfreys, Julian, ed. Qingdao: China Ocean University Press, 2006, 10.
Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Kella, E. Beloved communities: Solidarity and difference in fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Joy Kogwana. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2000.
Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.
Kirwan, Holden and L, Jennifer.“Looking into the self that is no self: an examination of subjectivity in Beloved.”African American Review. 32.3 (Fall 1998). Literature Resource Center.
Maxwell, M. Male rage and female fury: Gender and violence in contemporary American fiction. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Otten, Terri. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia University: Pof Missouri, 1989.
Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. Hong Kong. Print, 2000.
Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A.“Daughters Signifying History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”American Literature 64, September, 1992.
Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction——Post-War Women Novelists. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1992.
Shapiro, Barbara.“The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”Contemporary Literature 32.2 (1991).
Spillers, Hortense J.“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”Diacritics 17. 2. (1987).
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