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After the publication of Tar Baby,there has ever occurred a great many disputesamong critics and scholars.Peterson thinks it is“Morrison’s perhaps most problematicand unresolved novel”(Peterson,1993:471).And Maline Walther Pereira(1997),in hisarticle“Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work form The Bluest Eye to Jazz:TheImportance of Tar Baby”,remarks that the novel marks a key shift in Morrison’sexploration of decolonization.Up till now,scholars and critics abroad have mademuch explorations into this novel from the perspectives of identity,ethnic culture,narration,post-modernism,feminism and class contradictions.

The theme of identity occupies an important position among the studies done onthis work.Most critics focus on Jadine’s identity dilemma.They tend to hold that theproblematic identification of Jadine is due to her ambivalent attitudes toward“theancient properties”(Morrison,2004:305).Furman in the book Toni Morrison’s Fictionpublished in 1996 discusses community and cultural identity in Tar Baby and points outthat the failure of knowing the past will lead to cultural orphan as Margaret and Jadine.John N.Duvall(1997)talks about black female identity,combining the novel with Morrison’s personal name change in“Descent in the‘House of Chole’:Race,Rape andIdentity in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby”.He thinks the black women Morrison attemptsto portray have exceeded the boundaries of the white and the black men’s version ofblack female.In Quiet As It’s Kept:Shame,Trauma and Race in the Novels of ToniMorrison published in 2000,J.Brooks Bouson makes a study on Morrison’sinvestigation into the crisis-of-identity,the psychological trauma and the ethnic shamewithin African American community based on psychoanalysis.According to the twohistorical backgrounds,the high fashion industry and post-civil rights era and blackpragmatism,Faith M.Avery(2014)seeks to interpret Jadine’s ethical identity dilemmamore deeply in his essay.

1.2 Studies on Tar Baby at Home

In China,although there have occurred a great many essays about Tar Baby,critical articles are fewer compared with Morrison’s other works like Beloved and TheBluest Eye.

Identity issue ranks first among domestic studies on this work.Some critics focusmore on identity dilemma in the novel.In“The‘Cultural Orphan’Wandering BetweenBlack and White:The Ethical Predicament of Jadine in Tar Baby”,Han Xiu(2017)paysattention to Jadine’s ethical identity.She attributes Jadine’s ethical predicament to heridentity as an orphan.In addition to black characters in the novel,some scholars alsoturn their eyes on other white roles.Xiang Jiao(2017)takes the perspective ofexistential psychology so as to delve into identity anxiety of the Valerians in the thesisentitled“The Whites’Identity Anxiety in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby”.Their identityplight is doomed for their weak sense of autonomous identity and their isolation fromthe society they belong to.Her research inspires related debates about theunboundedness of identity issues and find the unive本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。