Postmodern Realism In Morrison's Historical Trilogy Of Novels

Toni Morrison's most famous three novels Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise had been published during 80s to 90s last century. These novels, which are on the history of African-American, which are being tried to be forgotten but still affecting the lives of African-American, are called historical trilogy of novels by comments.This Morrison's historical trilogy of novels are based on the history of African-American. It reveals the unknown aspects of black people's history distorted by American official. With postmodernism feature in frame, the writer mkes full use of the mechanics of modernism. And the criticism to hegemony of ideology become the novels' core, showing the query attitude towards central of the Occident in fringe attitude. Thus her works are full of representative specialties of postmodern realism. This dissertation starts with Jose David Saldivar's concept "postmodern realism " to analyze Morrison's historical trilogy of novels, including three parts : first, her novels depict certain history and events, shape representative persons, and discuss the destiny of Afican-American, which maintain the feature of traditional realism documentary; second, discusses on the subjective construction of her novels' postmodern realism, that is persons with double-consciousness and African-American's attempt to re-constitute their history and the process how African-American women gradually enter the mainstream; third, this dissertation focuses on studying her novels' postmodern realism skills, especially the absorption from some mechanics from magic realism , reference to the music of black tradition and the multiple language, which is not only a creative study of Morrison's works, but also a complement to the concept "postmodern realism" of Jose David Saldivar.Postmodern realism maintain the realistic tradition which is a concern on the history and reality. On the other side, they overcome the concept of "reality" and "history" in the traditional realism and highlighted a "post-modern" perspective. They combine the self-awareness in modern novels and the self-inspection in avant-garde novels, inherits and develops the modernism in aesthetic and technique. The key difference between postmodern realism literature and modernism literature is the further exploration of intervention and expression on politics and history in an analogic realism style. It is appropriate to call them postmodern realism novels because of the serious forms, approaching to real life, wonderful stories and meaningful contents. In a sense, postmodern realism is a new development of literature, therefore the study on it is of great importance .