Toni Morrison is widely recognized for reclaiming the occluded narratives of African-American history and the Africanist presence in American national identity. This revised edition (previously published in the Macmillan Modern Novelists Series) highlights the extent to which her work invokes, often subversively, familiar African-American and Euro-American verbal narratives and is engaged by the histories that are obscured or distorted in them. Reviewing Morrison's career from The Bluest Eye to Paradise, this study suggests that as her work has become more specifically concerned with particular episodes or events in black history, it has also become more involved in the complexities of historiography. This edition also has increased emphasis on the critical debates that Morrison's fiction has generated and the different theoretical approaches that may be taken to her work.