Intertextual relationships in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Intertextual relationships in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is mostly known for frequently bringing up the problems of African-American people living in the US and of the black women in particular and social issues like racism, discrimination, feminism and male domination. She is also famous for revealing starkly the lives of African American society within dominant American culture from past to present. Morrison strengthens her fiction by establishing a close relationship between her stories and various texts as a significant characteristic feature of the postmodern period that she also belongs to. This close relationship can obviously be seen in The Bluest Eye which is the first novel of Morrison. In The Bluest Eye, she shows how the incidents that are the symbols of happiness for white society affect the African-American people by referring to a famous child story Dick-and-Jane that is well-known for American society. Furthermore, entitling the chapters of the novel as a season, she negates the features which people associates with seasons for African people living in the US. This study aims to examine the intertextual relationships in The Bluest Eye. Keywords: Intertextuality, Postmodernism, Toni Morrison, African-American society

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