Toni Morrison and Classical Tradition

This article summarizes a significant new approach to the work of the African‐American novelist Toni Morrison: analysis of her widespread engagement with classical tradition. After discussing the prior critical perspectives on this subject, and highlighting the importance of the classics in Morrison's intellectual formation, it demonstrates that the author's ambivalent classicism is central to the rewriting of American history that her oeuvre enacts. I go on to show that her insistence on the interactions between African and Graeco‐Roman cultures contributes to her reinvention of classical tradition as a radical force, and I end by illuminating the implications for literary and American Studies that the recognition of her classicism must possess.