Focuses on the role of shame and trauma as it looks at issues of race, class, color, and caste in the novels of Toni Morrison.
J. Brooks Bouson is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University in Chicago. She is the author of The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self and Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.
"I like the insightful and unforced way in which the concepts of shame and trauma are applied to the texts. The book is extremely well researched and informative, both in the discussion of shame and trauma and in the discussion of race matters and the secondary criticism on Morrison's work. Both literary scholars and psychologists should find it of great interest." - Joseph Adamson, coeditor of Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing
"This book is marked by its lucidity; its command of the psychological theories of shame and trauma; its careful, informed readings of Morrison's texts; and its generally persuasive argument about the importance of shame and trauma to an understanding of Morrison's work." - Barbara Schapiro, author of Literature and the Relational Self