Introduction
Toni Morrison (1931--)，one of the greatest figures in the field of contemporary American literature, has gained wide popularity in literary world due to her constant and prominent writings. During her long writing career, from the first novel The Bluest Eyes (1970), then Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981)，Beloved (1987), Jazz (1993), Paradise (1998) to her latest fiction Love (2003), Morrison has accomplished eight novels, a play, a short story, a collection of critical essays, and several edited volumes, based on which she grows into the black pearl of American literature. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, greeted by many encomiums in many literary circles. Morrisons novels are finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation, written with the luster of poetry; she delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetter of race. In all her novels she concentrates on the life of ordinary black people, especially African American women with her sensitive and privileged observation.
Beloved, which was published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, is her fifth novel, and is viewed as her best novel. Since its publication, Beloved has attracted so many readers and critics. The American literary world has a high praise for this novel. Nation valued it as "Toni Morrisons finest work... it belongs to the highest shelf of our literature even if half a dozen canonized Wonder Bread Boys have to be elbowed off. Without Beloved our imagination of America had a heart-sized hole in it big enough to die from." Chicago Sun-Time once valued Beloved as "Toni Morrisons finest work.… Nothing she has written so sets her apart, so displays her prodigious, almost shocking talents." This great novel has inspired a large quantity of reviews from various approaches, including feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial, cultural, and other perspectives on almost every facet of the novel which includes its theme, language, character, symbol, narrative strategy studies, etc.
