Entry #1 Why I Chose This Lens

For this project I have decided to look at the book Beloved through the New Historicism critical lens. I am interested in this lens because I like history. I like learning about history and I feel like I would enjoy finding the historical elements in the story. A New Historicism lens means looking at a book and connecting it to the time period it was produced in. Then we can identify cultural and political movements of the time that are present in the text. I am hoping to get a better understanding of the author and the characters by looking at the time period. The book itself is a historical fiction book. This means that the plot of the book has a setting in the past. So the time period of the book is around 1873. But the author, Toni Morrison was born in 1931 and she wrote the book in 1987. Because the author was raised in a different time period, she will be seeing things in a different way and that will be shown in his book.