The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at Beloved by Toni Morrison.

No novel of recent years has been more honored than Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and was a major reason for Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in literature five years later – a distinction all the more striking when once considers that only three other native-born US writers earned this prestigious award during the second half of the 20th Century. More recently, Beloved trounced the competition in The New York Times survey of authors and critics to determine the best book of American fiction during the last twenty-five years.

But if the Nobel judges love Morrison, college professors love her even more. The Toni Morrison Society lists some 150 dissertations on the author, and enough academic articles to keep a graduate student in the library for years. I can’t imagine another novel of recent years assigned by more teachers in more classrooms. Do a Google search on “Beloved” and “syllabus,” and take a look yourself. Beloved is that rarity among contemporary novels: it was selling by the truckload even before Oprah gave it her stamp of approval.

Hence, one might assume that Beloved is the most canonical of modern novels, if not the foundation of the New Canon. Yet there is some heavy irony here, since Beloved might also be the first book picked for The Anti-Canon, the novels that upset the applecart of traditional literary canonization. As one commentator has noted, Toni Morrison is the Living Black Female to counter the Dead White Males who have long dominated literary studies.

Beloved also challenges the ‘old school’ standards by which novels have been evaluated –- based on factors such as poetic writing, creative use of language, metaphor, etc. Yes, you can find these elements in Beloved, but they are a little beside the point. Morrison herself has admitted to getting “annoyed at people who said there were poetic things in my writing.” In short, this novel goes hand-in-hand with post-colonial, post-patriarchal, post-Eurocentric attempts to restructure not just the priorities of fiction, but also the ways and means by which fiction is assessed and appreciated.