Collected for the first time in one volume, Language as Liberation compiles Toni Morrison’s lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University as she explores and interrogates the American literary canon. Morrison examines the works of American authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, and Mark Twain, and how the American conception of race is both reflected and invented in these works. With an introduction from Morrison’s Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, this book displays the brilliance of Morrison, as a thinker, reader, and writer. “The originality of Morrison’s thinking, with respect to the composition of specifically American fiction, lies, by contrast, in its theoretical and practical contention that imagination and race do not contradict but rather supplement each other within the constitution of a constitutively divided nation’s literature,” writes Brodsky.
