Fictional narratives about slavery have had a surprising renaissance in the twenty-first century. Sometimes called neo-slave narratives to emphasize their indebtedness to historical antebellum or post-emancipation slave narratives, such fictional narratives about slavery flourished from the 1960s to the 1990s. When Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, it was given in recognition of her entire body of work, but it also came shortly after the publication of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of slavery, Beloved. In the twenty-first century, the genre has demonstrated remarkable staying power as an important subgenre of historical fiction. From the outset, the reception of neo-slave narratives has been contentious, resulting in debates about historical accuracy and representation and questions about whether white writers should tell these stories. Since the 1980s, the term neo-slave narrative has been disseminated widely in literary criticism.