Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved"

Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem completed her Ph.D. in English at The Graduate Center of CUNY. She is Associate Professor of English at CUNY/Kingsborough and Affiliate Professor of Arts and Letters in Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Maureen’s research is on Anglophone writing of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries with specializations in Irish, Asian, and African American literatures. Her research fields include Irish studies, Partition studies, and Postcolonial Studies; within those areas she looks at questions of reparations, of literary poetics, and of race, gender, and class. Maureen’s first book, The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands appeared from Palgrave in 2015. In 2019, a second book-length study titled Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian was brought out by Rowman & Littlefield. In late 2020, Routledge, Inc. will bring out Maureen’s co-edited collection, in which she has two chapters, The Economics of Empire: Genealogies of Capital and the Colonial Encounter. Recent articles include "A Consciousness of Streets: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Partition" (Synthesis, 2016) and "Drawing the Border, Queering the Nation: Nation Trouble in Breakfast on Pluto and The Crying Game" (Gender Forum, 2016). In 2021, Maureen will commence new research for a three-volume comparative study of modes of realism in the contemporary literatures of partition and for a second edited collection called Imperial Debt, Postcolonial Reparations. She lives in Brooklyn.

Acknowledgments xiii
Foreword: Too Many, Too Quiet, Too Long;
or, “Anything is better than the silence” xvii

1 Remembering Is Not Forgetting; or, History Is in the
Texts of It [The Form of Beloved] 1

2 Tragedy and Its Props; or, History Is in the Things
of It [The Craft of Beloved] 33

3 Literary Memory and the Amnesiac Nation; or,
“The rest is weather” [Object Lesson, I] 73

4 Bodies [sic] Matter; or, “Certainly no clamor for a
kiss” [Object Lesson, II] 110

5 The Powers of Intertextuality, the Specter of
Reparations; or, Three Tragedies and a Critique of
the American Slave State [The Object of Beloved] 151

Afterword: First Things, Lost Things; or,
The Purloined Name and the Necessity of
(Postcolonial) Failure 188

Coda: Impossible Things; or, “I’ve had enough of
shitty news” 202

Bibliography 231
Index 243