The Haunted House in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy 101 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 19 (2015), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X, pp. 99-113 character in your story as any people in it” (Koonz 75).
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio to working-class parents Ramah and George Wofford. Morrison’s parents relocated to Ohio from the South in order to escape the racism that became increasingly violent in the South in the early 1900s. After graduating from Howard University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1953, Morrison earned a Masters of the Arts in English from Cornell University. Morrison then worked as an English professor at various universities, including Howard University, her alma mater. She published her first novel, in 1970. Since her first work, Morrison has published eleven novels, including Pulitzer prize-winning, along with multiple plays, works of children’s literature, and non-fiction books. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a work of historical fiction, Toni Morrison’s novel references the historical climate and events of the time period and place in which it is set: 17th century America. In early colonial America, various types of human bondage, from chattel slavery to indentured servitude, were common and omnipresent. Morrison alludes to how, in the 17th century, American land ownership was constantly shifting, with European powers fighting against native tribes and each other for ownership. Through the character of Lina, Morrison describes the atrocities committed against the native peoples of North America under colonial rule. In order to frame the shifting racial climate of the late 17th century, Morrison alludes specifically to Bacon’s Rebellion, a 1676 uprising of slaves and indentured servants against the rule of Virginia governor William Berkeley. The rebellion, lead by colonist Nathaniel Bacon, was ultimately suppressed.
However, the collaboration between slaves (who were, for the most part, black) and indentured servants (primarily white Europeans) concerned rich Virginian landowners, because it showed the subversive power of a united lower class. Following Bacon’s Rebellion, the Virginia government instated a series of laws referred to as the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, reducing the rights of black slaves and black people in general in the state of Virginia.
Historians generally understand these laws and others passed following Bacon’s Rebellion as an attempt by Virginian landowners and officials to encourage racism and sharpen racial divisions. They did this in order to prevent the unification of the lower class across racial lines that threatened white landowning power in 1676. A Mercy takes place during the critical period following Bacon’s Rebellion, as racial boundaries began to harden.
Within U.S.A.About this Item: Alfred A. Condition: Fine.
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Stated First (1st) Edition, First (1st) Printing of Morrison's acclaimed historical novel of the slave trade. Grey boards with dark grey binding show light shelf wear, while the dust jacket shows light shelf wear with small rub mark to UPC code and is now protected by a removable, non-damaging, archival mylar cover. Pages are clean and unmarked, binding is tight and secure.
We provide original pictures of all items - Please review these pictures prior to purchase, as the item pictured will be the exact item of which you will receive. This item ships in a secure, padded box with tracking numbers provided to ensure easy, safe and fast delivery. Seller Inventory # 004415 1. Within U.S.A.About this Item: Alfred A. Knopf; A Borzoi Book, New York, 2008. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine.
167 pp.; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Stated 'First Edition.' Dust jacket protected in a mylar book cover. 'In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy.
Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in 'flesh,' he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.
This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
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A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. / Toni Morrison is the author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and childrens literature, most recently, the novel A Mercy. She twice has received the Pulitzer Prize-for Sula (1974) and Beloved (1988)-as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Most recently the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, she lives in Rockland County, New York.'
Size: 8vo - over 7¾' - 9¾' tall. Seller Inventory # 072891 9.
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