Critical Insights: The Bluest Eye

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Though previously praised for its nuanced exploration of race, class, social identity, and childhood in America, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye has become increasingly misunderstood, misrepresented, and under attack in recent years. 

This new addition to the Critical Insights series takes a close look Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. Examining topics such as beauty, childhood, environment, education, geographical region, fables, literary influence, marketing, musicality, and trauma, racism, social inequity, social identity, and exclusion in America, Morrison’s novel remains highly relevant in today’s tumultuous political landscape.   

In addition to exploring the novel’s central themes, this volume offers a variety of fresh perspectives on related topics from book bans to geographical regions to literary influence.

The Four Critical Context Essays Include:

• You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: The Changing Face of The Bluest Eye Marketing and Publishing Materials
• The Critical Reception of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
• Look. And Breed Love: Rereading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Through an Afrofuturist Framework
• “I’ll do it myself”: On Toni Morrison’s Redemption of Pecola Breedlove Through The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child

Following these four Critical Context essays is the Critical Readings section of this book, which contains the following essays:

• Avoiding Absolutes and Finding the Midwestern Middle Ground: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as Midwestern Literature and as Backdrop to Exploring Gray Areas 
• Toni Morrison’s Migrations to Ohio for Recovery
• Spatiality in Morrison Contexts: Mapping Racialized Spaces in The Bluest Eye
• “A productive and fructifying pain”: Fraught Depictions of Girlhood, Womanhood, and Motherhood in The Bluest Eye and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre
• Rewriting “The Ugly Duckling”: The Bluest Eye and Civil Disorder(s) in the 1960s
• “Been a slave to the blues”: Voices of Madness in The Bluest Eye
• Sampling The Bluest Eye: Toni Morrison’s Hip-Hop Children
• The Ongoing Siege: Challenges and Censorship of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye 
• “This amazing, troubling book”: A Case for Teaching The Bluest Eye in the Twenty-first Century

Each essay in Critical Insights: The Bluest Eye includes a list of Works Cited and detailed endnotes. In the final section, Resources, a Chronology of Toni Morrison’s life is provided along with a list of her Works, and a Bibliography. Finally, this section closes with an About the Editor section, Contributors, and a detailed Index.

The Critical Insights Series distills the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world’s most studied literature. Edited and written by some of academia’s most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights: The Bluest Eye provides authoritative, in-depth insights that will be valuable students, researchers, and anyone who is interested in learning more about the themes in this novel. This volume is destined to become a valuable purchase for all.

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