A novel following Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted, in both a figurative and a literal, ghost-driven sense, by the infant daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery. Loosely inspired by the real historical case of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own child in 1856 rather than allow her recapture, the novel refuses a linear telling of its central trauma, circling and withholding it across a fragmented, nonlinear structure that formally enacts the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
Facts
Classification
Original Language AwardPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1 Composed, From (Year) Connections
Associated With
Widely discussed as a landmark of postmodern historiographic metafiction.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Authored By
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
In Genre
Gothic Fiction, Genres Scholarship reads Beloved through Gothic convention (the haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road, the returned dead) applied to the history of American slavery, a Feminine or Southern Gothic rather than the novel's primary classification.
Source Toni Morrison and the Gothic (The Gothic Library)
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: United States, originated there.
- Also in Language Atlas: English, original language there.
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Norton Anthology of World Literature
W. W. Norton & Company
Toni Morrison and the Gothic (The Gothic Library)
The Gothic LibraryIn Genre: Gothic Fiction, Toni Morrison and the Gothic
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