Jean Wyatt’s Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels is a much-needed contribution to Morrison studies because it focuses on the formal properties of Morrison’s works and because it adds to the sparse criticism on the later novels, including the most recent, God Help the Child (2015). In this accessible and precise study, Wyatt’s purpose is threefold: she uses a psychoanalytic method to show how Morrison’s novels’ formal properties work on readers; she demonstrates that the narrative method reflects the conceptualization of love in each novel; and she makes connections between narrative form and African American history. Wyatt is, at base, a psychoanalytic critic, but in this study, like her preceding work, Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism (2004), she deftly positions psychoanalytic theory as integral to understanding not only literature but also African American history and culture, thus refuting the oft-repeated accusation...

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