Language as Liberation

“There is intellectual pleasure to be had in Morrison’s exacting, appreciative readings of Twain, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein… . The effect of … Language as Liberation is to bring her from dull, sanctified solitude into the busy fold of canonized American writers, whose difficult books demand to be plumbed and debated and compared, and, most of all, to be reread.”
—Wall Street Journal

“We’ve long known the late Toni Morrison as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and an astute cultural critic. Here we engage her as a scholar in a collection of Princeton University lectures enriched by marginalia, a beguiling testament to a prodigious mind in motion. American literature has been shaped by streams of influences from an array of continents and peoples, a ‘chaos’ of imagery and rhythms as vibrant and volatile as the nation itself. Taking stock of works from writers like Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Gertrude Stein, Morrison probes the ‘powerful presence of Africanist personae, discourse, and narrative’ within our emerging canon.”
—TIME Magazine

“Provides unprecedented insight into Morrison’s roles as cultural critic and thought leader… . Morrison inverts our understanding of classic American literature… . An insightful invitation to revisit the familiar with new eyes.”
—Booklist

“Deeply insightful investigations of major works.”
—Kirkus

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. From 1989 to 2006, Morrison was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

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