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Language as Liberation

Reflections on the American Canon

Author Toni Morrison
Introduction by Claudia Brodsky
Hardcover
$35.00 US
Knopf
On sale Feb 03, 2026 | 240 Pages | 9780593802748
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Collected in one astonishing volume, Toni Morrison’s explorations of Blackness and the American literary canon

Perhaps no novelist has meant more to contemporary fiction than Toni Morrison. And in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Morrison spent 17 years as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching courses in African American studies, creative writing, and American literature.

Now, for the first time ever, Morrison’s lectures on the American canon are compiled together, granting readers unprecedented access to Morrison’s scholarship, critical eye, and relentless brilliance. Researching several of America’s most famous works and authors, Morrison illuminates the relationship between race, the arts, and life beyond the page.

From Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the works of Faulkner and Hemmingway, Morrison interrogates major works of American literature as only she can. With an introduction from Morrison’s colleague, Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory book that once again displays Morrison’s intellectual and literary greatness.
TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019. View titles by Toni Morrison

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Collected in one astonishing volume, Toni Morrison’s explorations of Blackness and the American literary canon

Perhaps no novelist has meant more to contemporary fiction than Toni Morrison. And in addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Morrison spent 17 years as the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, teaching courses in African American studies, creative writing, and American literature.

Now, for the first time ever, Morrison’s lectures on the American canon are compiled together, granting readers unprecedented access to Morrison’s scholarship, critical eye, and relentless brilliance. Researching several of America’s most famous works and authors, Morrison illuminates the relationship between race, the arts, and life beyond the page.

From Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the works of Faulkner and Hemmingway, Morrison interrogates major works of American literature as only she can. With an introduction from Morrison’s colleague, Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory book that once again displays Morrison’s intellectual and literary greatness.

Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019. View titles by Toni Morrison

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