The Social Ecological Construction in Toni Morrison’s <i>Beloved</i>

Toni Morrison is the first African-American female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Due to the unique artistic charm of her novels, her works have continuously attracted domestic and foreign critics to make interpretations from a variety of theoretical approaches, such as postcolonialism, feminist criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism. However, there is still room for further research on Toni Morrison’s novels in terms of eco-criticism. Taking Toni Morrison's novel Beloved as a case study, this paper aims to interpret how the historical fate of the protagonist is associated with the disturbance of social-ecological balance in the work through text analysis. This paper mainly starts from the macro level of ecological discourse analysis and analyzes the social-ecological philosophy in the novel, including elaborating and analyzing the relationships among family members and the relationships between individuals and the community, thereby enriching the understanding of the ecological implications of Morrison's novels and expanding the research scope of eco-criticism.