Toni Morrison's Beloved And Its Postmodernist Style

Toni Morrison is one of the greatest contemporary American writers. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993 and was the first African-American writer and the second American woman writer to enjoy this honor. Her fifth novel, Beloved, is her representative work, which won a Pulitzer Prize. When it was first published in September 1987, it created a sensation in the American literary world and has been regarded as a milestone in American literary history.Literary critics have done a lot of research on Beloved from many aspects. The topics like narrative discourse, characters, theme, race and postmodernity etc. have drawn many people's strong interests; however, very few have made all-sided studies upon Morrison's postmodernist style in Beloved. This thesis is attempting to make a relatively all-around analysis on its postmodernist style in the light of postmodernist characteristics, postmodernist narrative characteristics and postmodernist language deviation. It is divided into five parts.The first chapter briefly introduces the development of American postmodernist fiction, Toni Morrison and her novel Beloved, a general survey about the external and internal studies on Beloved so far done.Chapter two discusses three postmodernist characteristics in postmodernist fiction and their representations in Beloved: metafiction, intertextuality and"the death of the subject". Beloved is not only a novel with the self-deconstruction of language, the blending of allusions, black mysterious elements, children's songs, town-talk and graceful lyrics, but also a novel with the deconstruction and reconstruction of structure, plots and characters.Chapter three analyzes postmodernist narrative characteristics in Beloved: its narrative point of view and narrative space-time outlook with emphasis on its multidimensional transition of narrative point of view, the blurry demarcation between the past and the present and the switch of scenes.Chapter four investigates postmodernist language deviation in Beloved. Based on Leech's eight kinds of classification on postmodernist language deviation, this part analyzes the obvious usage of five--semantic deviation, grammatical deviation, discourse variation, deviation of register and graphological deviation. Oxymoron, symbols, non-standard use of sentence structure and sentences'punctuation, no-ending or multi-ending, juxtaposition of unrelated plots, blending of different writing genres and non-standard graphology are mentioned respectively in this chapter.Through the detailed analysis of Beloved's postmodernist style in terms of postmodernist characteristics, postmodernist narrative characteristics and postmodernist language deviation, in chapter five, this thesis comes to draw a conclusion that in the author's view, Beloved is a typical postmodernist novel with a perfect combination of both postmodernist style and African-American literary features although Toni Morrison herself denied postmodernity in her works to some degree.