ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison is Robert F. Goheen Professor, Council of the Humanities, Princeton University, but is better known as the author of six highly regarded novels: The Bluest Eye (1972), Sula (1974), Song of Soloman (1978) which won the 1978 National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction, Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Jazz. Describing the nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison observes, 'No slave society in the history of the world wrote more, or more thoughtfully, about its own enslavement'. Morrison, then, aims to restore a dimension of the repressed personal in a manifestly political discourse. In some ways, the texts of the slave narratives can be regarded as classic examples of the 'return of the repressed', primarily because the events relating to violence and violation return again and again in 'veiled allusions'.
