Academic calls for recognition of Toni Morrison
Art 07 Mar 11 Dr Tessa Roynon (left) with Toni Morrison (below) and the other international scholars invited to the celebration (Credit: Toni Morrison Society) An English academic has called for the UK to recognise the significance of Toni Morrison's work, after attending the Nobel Prize-winning novelist's 80th birthday at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Dr Tessa Roynon, a lecturer in English at St Peter's College, was invited to the event on February 18 because she contributed a chapter, 'Aeschylus, Euripides and Toni Morrison', to the Festschrift entitled 'Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honour of Toni Morrison'. Toni Morrison was presented with the Festschrift at the event. Dr Roynon said: 'Morrison's oeuvre - her nine novels, a ground-breaking work of literary criticism, and a stunning corpus of essays and speeches - places her indisputably on a par with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Ralph Ellison. Yet in Britain there is a tangible resistance to conferring that kind of status upon her. 'I have been reading, thinking and writing about the novels of this Nobel-prize winning author for nearly twenty years, and I am (happily and of course) not alone. And yet even in bookish Oxford, where I live, I am continually amazed by the number of well-read citizens who are not familiar with her work, or even with her name.
