With excerpts from interviews and reviews, an exploration of the historical documents and slave narrative traditions on which Morrison drew, and an insightful juxtaposition of psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches to the novel, this guide places Beloved in the contexts of Morrison's oeuvre and other works of African American literature. Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author's treatment of the physical self.

In recent years the work of Charlotte Bronte has undergone a significant reassessment from a postcolonial critical perspective. This book develops current scholarship by providing historically and theoretically informed readings of the full range of her texts, including new analyses of her four best known novels and other less familiar work, such as the Ashanti narratives, the poetry and the Belgian essays.

The Discourse of Slavery is a collection of essays addressing the issue of slavery within literary, cultural and political writings. Slavery is here examined critically within both British and American contexts, and related to contemporary concerns connected with race and gender.

Apparently innocuous, sugar is a substance which brings with it a profound disquiet, not least because of its direct links with the histories of slavery in the New World. These links have long been a source of critical fascination, generating several landmark analyses, ranging from Fernando Ortis's Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) and Noel Deerr's monumental two-volume The History of Sugar (1949-50) to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). Unlike previous texts, Plasa's meticulously researched book not only examines the traditional...