For Those “Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter”: Morrison’s Home and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf.

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  • Author(s): Penner, Erin (AUTHOR)
  • Source:
    African American Review. Winter2016, Vol. 49 Issue 4, p343-359. 17p.
  • Additional Information
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      Toni Morrison’s novel Home replaces nostalgia for midcentury America with reminders of McCarthyism and the Korean War. She wanted to, as she said, “take the scab off the ’50s.” In doing so, she returns to a critical time in her own life and the authors who preoccupied her during graduate work at Cornell: William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Reading Faulkner, Woolf, and Morrison’s own master’s thesis alongside her recent novel draws out the critical slant of her fiction, as she uses the literature and history of an earlier era to lay bare the cultural cost of nostalgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
    • Abstract:
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