"Beloved": Character Studies

Beloved is an extraordinary novel: it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1987, and author Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Lterature in 1993. Set in the era of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction in the United States, Beloved explores essential questions involving freedom, selfhood, love, and responsibility. The novel's intricate narrative strategies, its compelling cast of characters, and its exploration of African American history make Beloved a richly complex and often difficult text. This guide to Morrison's novel will help readers not only to understand the story in depth, but to develop sophisticated skills of literary analysis. Readers who grapple successfully with Beloved's characters will also gain valuable insight into the rich thematics and haunting philosophical questions of the novel.

Nancy J. Peterson is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University, USA. She is the author of Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory (U of Pennsylvania P) and the editor of Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches (John Hopkins UP).