Nancy J. Peterson

"Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987, which led up to Toni Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and is the most-often taught novel by Morrison. It is a rich text, as well as a difficult one, in need of a student guide that can help undergraduates not only to understand the story but to develop sophisticated skills of critical analysis. Students who grapple successfully with "Beloved's" characters will also gain valuable insight into the major themes of the novel, Morrison's intricate narrative strategies, African American history and culture, and theories useful for interpreting literature.Character Studies aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts' themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.

"Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987, which led up to Toni Morrison's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and is the most-often taught novel by Morrison. It is a rich text, as well as a difficult one, in need of a student guide that can help undergraduates not only to understand the story but to develop sophisticated skills of critical analysis. Students who grapple successfully with "Beloved's" characters will also gain valuable insight into the major themes of the novel, Morrison's intricate narrative strategies, African American history and culture, and theories useful for interpreting literature.Character Studies aims to promote sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts' themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.

In Against Amnesia, Nancy J. Peterson addresses the ongoing postmodernist debate over the possibility and relevance of documentary and official histories. Drawing on Adrienne Rich's claim that women's literature and multicultural literature vigorously resist the amnesia and nostalgia that characterize mainstream North American culture, Peterson examines the struggles toward collective memory in a wealth of contemporary women's writing. Peterson's in-depth analyses of selected works by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Irena Klepfisz, Joy Kogawa, and other contemporary women writers illustrate the ways in which these authors recover and represent the historical memories attached to their racial/ethnic backgrounds. Their works probe traumatic moments in the marginalized histories of minority peoples, including Native American genocide and dispossession; African American slavery, migration, and displacement; the Holocaust; and the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Peterson contends that these writers employ literary strategies that call attention to the gaps and silences of official histories. At the same time, these literary strategies allow the authors to narrate resonant counterhistories. Rejecting the playfully imaginative treatment of history found in typical postmodern novels, these contemporary women writers seek to reconstruct historical narratives in their texts and thereby reinvigorate historical memory in contemporary American culture.