Aesthetics of representation in Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved

Abstract

African American literature, through the aesthetics of representation, has consistently revealed and condemned racism against the African American population in the United States of America. This process of revelation and condemnation has also generated sustained critical attention aimed at assessing the effectiveness of such representations. The thrust of this study, therefore, is to appraise the patterns of representation adopted by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison in their respective novels: Native Son, Black Boy, Invisible Man, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved. To achieve this objective effectively, the study adopts the neo-Marxist concept of the “mediated subject” in order to interpret and evaluate representations of character, action, voice, motivation, and thematic concerns within the confines of aesthetic sensibilities in literary art.