Beloved by Toni Morrison (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

By Bright Summaries

Unlock the more straightforward side of Beloved with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!

This engaging summary presents an analysis of Beloved by Toni Morrison, which tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who was prepared to commit a horrific crime rather than be forced back into slavery with her children. The novel explores the aftermath of her actions, and starkly illustrates the devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery and the legacy of trauma it left for African-American families. Toni Morrison is one of America’s most acclaimed living writers, having received awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature in the course of her decades-long career.

Find out everything you need to know about Beloved in a fraction of the time!

This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:
•A complete plot summary
•Character studies
•Key themes and symbols
•Questions for further reflection

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• Language: English
• Publisher: BrightSummaries.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9782808014687

Book preview

AMERICAN WRITER

Born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931.

Notable works:

The Bluest Eye (1970), novel

Song of Solomon (1977), novel

A Mercy (2008), novel

Toni Morrison is an award-winning writer and a Nobel Laureate. She is widely considered to be one of the most important American writers of our time.

Morrison is a writer of novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction. She is also an editor and a professor emeritus at Princeton University. She has received various prizes for her work, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved, and most notably, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

She is an African-American writer, and her work explores the experiences of black people in America. Her success and her status as an intellectual and as a Nobel Laureate mark her out as one of the most influential black American writers of the past decades. Slavery, racial oppression and the experience of being black in America are important elements in her fiction. Other significant themes include family, motherhood and love. Morrison’s style is unique: her use of language is poetic, and her use of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) brings her characters to life.

A NOVEL ABOUT SLAVERY, VIOLENCE AND A MOTHER’S LOVE

Genre: novel.

Reference edition: Morrison, T. (2007) Beloved. London: Vintage.

1stedition: 1987

Themes: slavery, racism, violence, infanticide, family, motherhood, love, memory

Beloved is the first part