From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Morrison takes a turn as a literary critic, examining the American literary imagination and finding it obsessed with the white/black polarity. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Morrison ( Jazz , LJ 4/15/92) believes that an African American presence, largely ignored by critics, has always permeated white American literature. She opens by carefully setting her parameters and defining her terms--e.g., Africanism: "the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people." The first few pages feature densely packed language whose meaning becomes clearer when Morrison examines such specific works as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl . This brief, highly provocative book, which considers "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it," is highly recommended not only for Morrison's many admirers but for all those interested in American literature.-Louis J. Parascandola, Long Island Univ., Brooklyn Campus , New YorkCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Philadelphia Inquirer
"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity."


Book 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.

"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."
--Chicago Tribune

"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."
The New York Times Book Review


From the Publisher
"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity."--Philadelphia Inquirer


From the Inside Flap
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.

"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."


"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."
The New York Times Book Review


From the Back Cover
"A profound redefinition of American cultural identity...Her method of reading...inevitably revises what American literature means today."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Morrison brings the indomitable spirit of her fiction to her feelings about literature...She hits the center of an unspoken truth about American fiction and criticism--about what we take for granted, and what we ignore, in the process."
--Boston Sunday Globe

"A compelling dissection of U.S. fiction...To recognize the black presence in white fiction as offering both threat and reassurance permits Morrison to challenge some of the most widely accepted generalizations about our literary history...Morrison's individual readings are not just convincing, they are alarming."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[Toni Morrison's] argument is lucid and eloquent; its paradigm-shattering implications are profound. This brilliant and provocative book raises questions that have never been asked about American literature and provides some compelling models for how we might go about answering them. Morrison succeeds in mapping a new critical geography for American literary study."
--Journal of American History


About the Author
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio. She is Robert E. Goheen Professor, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University. She is the author of six novels: The Bluest Eye; Sula; Song of Solomon, which won the 1978 National Book Critics Award for fiction; Tar Baby; Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; and Jazz. Her most recent novel since winning the Nobel Prize 1993 is Paradise (1998).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morri

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Novelist Morrison takes a turn as a literary critic, examining the American literary imagination and finding it obsessed with the white/black polarity. (Aug.)

Library Journal