In the stereotypical high school hierarchy, jocks always reign over the band kids, theater geeks, and math geniuses. These athletic students separate themselves from the others, and as this occurs, the geeks, nerds and other social pariahs must...

Religion shapes and reshapes social relations as well as patterns of racial interaction in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Phillis Wheatley’s poem, On Being Brought from Africa to America. As becomes evident from examination of specific quotes of...

Toni Morrison is partly interested in the complex ways how uprootedness can ultimately confound self-understanding and self-direction. In A Mercy, Florens’ hesitation to choose is due to her inexperience of freedom, this underscores the way in...

In order to affirm one’s personal identity in the context of social structure, we often seek affirmation through relationships with other people. While these identities are constructed by our society, they play an influential role in the...

Home is a novel by distinguished writer Toni Morrison that explores the story of Frank, an African American man returning home post the Korean War, and his naïve and uneducated sister Cee. The novel takes us through the evolution of these...

In "The Historical Novel Today: Or, is it still Possible?", Frederic Jameson considers the various difficulties which face the historical novel today. Especially relevant to the essay, are his ideas on imagined time in the historical novel....

Maintaining her style, Toni Morrison goes over the struggles of class differences in her essay, "The Work You Do, the Person You Are." She produces a reflective piece that puts in evidence the strong mentality and craving she had for mattering, of...

From the first-person accounts during the abolitionist movement to the literary works during civil rights period and the contemporary times, African-American literature have extensively addressed social issues regarding race. Systemic racism, as...