Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
  • Ato Quayson
  • Published online:
    05 February 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021
  • This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

  • Chapter 6 - Form, Freedom, and Ethical Choice in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

  • Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
    Published online:
    05 February 2021
    Print publication:
    21 January 2021, pp 186-212

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.