Toni Morrison's 'Beloved': Origins [Paperback]

This work expands the scope of Morrisons project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the authors specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilizations primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of white authority and the disparaging of blackness, Beloveds multiple ghosts conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.

Chapter 1: Literary Archaeology   Chapter 2: Memory Work   Chapter 3: 124 is Haunted   Chapter 4: Origins I: Classical Greece   Chapter 5: Origins II: Out of Africa   Conclusion  Epilogue

Toni Morrisons Beloved: Origins explores the multifarious ways in which memory works to conserve a legacy of the ancient past. The vestiges of both Classical Greek and Ancient Egyptian belief systems call to a concern with myths of regeneration.

Obviously the labor of a seasoned scholar who has read widely and taken her time, Tally's critical adventure explores the contents and continents required to accumulate the richly interpretative hermeneutics demanded by her writer...she turns to the text, which to my mind renders her book a page-turner, the writing remarkably readable, sometimes riveting, often funny.  Susan Neal Mayberry, African American Review

Justine Tally is Professor of American Literature at the Unl#1