The Expressive Techniques Of Black Music In The Narrative Of Beloved

Toni Morrison, the first female Afro-American writer to receive Noble Prize, is one of the greatest figures in the field of contemporary American literature. The novel Beloved written in 1987 is considered her masterpiece and receives a Pulitzer Prize in the next year. Since then, her work Beloved has been getting more and more attention from literary critics. Many critics have made approach to this work from different perspectives such as feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism and its narrative devices, and have made great achievements.Among the different criticisms made on Beloved, a lot pay attention to the special narrative devices of the novel and study has been made in the light of one definite narrative theory, like Genette' s theory of narratology. But few critics have focused their attention on the great influence of black music on the narrative devices of the novel. My five-part thesis attempts to find the close relations between the black music and the narrative features of the novel, and to reveal the black music's great influence on the novel's writing and its narrative effect.