Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Fiction

Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Fiction investigates Morrison's aesthetics in terms of narrative's ethical import. Morrison's writing is concerned with ethically debatable issues and it offers a problematic representation of human experiences in African American history. Whilst previous critical studies consider ethics in relation to events in the story, Palladino explores its intersection with aesthetics. Narrativizing the moral law, Morrison's imperative is to relate the past, and to find ways to tell what is often unspeakable. The quest for ways to narrate horrific facts is a quest for an aesthetics which includes an appeal to the reader and thus necessarily engages with the ethical. This study foregrounds the equivocal as a key feature of narrative ethics.

About the author

Dr Mariangela Palladino is lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Keele. Her research interests and publications are at the intersection of postcolonial literatures and cultures, migration and diaspora, and interdisciplinary methods.

Product details

• Authors: Mariangela Palladino
• Publisher: Brill
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 08.02.2018
• EAN: 9789004360020
• ISBN: 978-90-04-36002-0
• No. of pages: 176
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 239 mm x 15 mm
• Weight: 363 g
• Series: Costerus New
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies