This is a call for chapter proposals for The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison. This companion text is intended for a scholarly audience and as support for newer Morrison scholars as they approach their research on her work.
Each chapter of the book has a dual function: to offer a new reading of Morrison and to review the Morrison scholarship in whatever general terrain the chapter falls within:
- Different from some companion texts, the Routledge Research Companion series publishes cutting-edge research rather than (mostly) secondary material. The secondary nature of such a companion—that it informs readers about scholarly trends and history or generally accepted understandings of an author and her work—is, in this case, to be built into each chapter. Each chapter is to point the way forward in terms of new directions in the study, interpretation, and theorization of Morrison’s oeuvre and, they are to review, in a thoroughgoing manner, existing scholarship on the topic area or theme of the chapter, to fill out the picture in terms of where and what Morrison studies has been, what scholars have been thinking, writing, and arguing since she started publishing through to today.
- Largely what we want to accomplish here is to tell the history of Morrison studies, through those reviews, and importantly to create a vision for it going forward, for the 21st Century. That is, to think beyond some of the more or less entrenched, perhaps restrictive, borders around the reception and interpretation of Morrison, some of the givens. How do we think beyond those limits or outside accustomed responses to Morrison? How create new and fruitful passages, meanings, readings, new knowledges inspired by the work of this African American woman writer and thinker, also a universally celebrated Nobel Laureate?
I’ve received excellent proposals on the following general topics:
Gender studies approaches:
1) (homoerotic) colonial desire and carcerality
2) queerness, fugitivity, and futurity
Not literary critical or “other” readings:
3) a study in the recently opened archive, The Toni Morrison Papers, and projected impacts on research
4) a chapter on Morrison in her role/work as an editor
5) a chapter on the figure of the daughter
Critical Tropes:
6) a chapter taking on the large area of image and visuality in Morrison
Comparative Morrison:
7) a chapter on the Morrison - Faulkner relationship
Intertextual Morrison:
8) and my chapter, mentioned above, on intertextual Beloved
Your chapter might fit within one of the above categories, especially kinship, tropes, comparativity and intertextuality, or possibly gender studies or other readings.
Or, your proposal might offer a different approach and, if so, we particularly hope to see readings in the following broad categories:
- Race / racism / antiracist literature
- Mothers / mothering
- A Women's studies approach
- Men / masculinity in Morrison
- Morrison as theoris (or research looking at work by her other than the novels)
- Classical Morrison
For more information click "LINK TO ORIGINAL" below.