Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy-- a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a "novel-tragedy" (Kliger)--and a novel of objects. Its many things--literary, conceptual,...