Fyodor Dostoevski’s (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) works fall into two periods that coincide with the time before his imprisonment and following it. The seven-year hiatus in his creative output between 1849 and 1857 corresponds to the four years… Read More ›
Fyodor Dostoevski’s (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) creative development is roughly divided into two stages. The shorter pieces, preceding his imprisonment, reflect native and foreign literary influences, although certain topics and stylistic innovations that became Dostoevski’s trademarks were already… Read More ›
University of Kannur M.A. English Literature ENG3E08 Third Semester European Fiction Scholarly Materials
All Bernard Malamud’s (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) fiction seems based on a single affirmation: Despite its disappointments, horror, pain, and suffering, life is truly worth living. His work may be best understood in the context of mid-twentieth… Read More ›
Most of Charles Bukowski’s writing examines his life as a drunk, drifter, gambler, loner, and unemployed and unemployable creature of habit. As noted in many documentaries, biographies, and accounts of Bukowski’s life, however, he also had a gentle side. As… Read More ›
An understanding of Raja Rao’s (8 November 1908 – 8 July 2006) art is enhanced by a contextualization of his novels. Although Rao admitted to several Western influences, his work is best understood as a part of the Indian tradition…. Read More ›
After a few minutes of reading stories that are not selfreflexive, readers sometimes forget what they are doing and feel transported into the world of the book. Considering this experience naïve, authors of self-reflexive fictions thwart it by such devices… Read More ›
Aestheticism European literary movement, with its roots in France, that was predominant in the 1890’s. It denied that art needed to have any utilitarian purpose and focused on the slogan “art for art’s sake.” The doctrines of aestheticism were introduced… Read More ›
Christopher Durang (born January 2, 1949) belongs to the postmodernist wave of American playwrights who emerged during the 1970’s, including A. R. Gurney, Jr., Tina Howe, and Sam Shepard. These writers fused the experimental techniques of the structuralist theater experiments… Read More ›
The reader interested in understanding any of the works of Nikos Kazantzakis would do well to begin by reading Salvatores Dei: Asketike (1927; The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, 1960). In this short philosophical expostulation, Kazantzakis expresses succinctly his strange… Read More ›
From the ancient belief in humors to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ psychoanalytic and pharmacological methodologies, diverse theories about the mind have affected the literary production of novelists. Categorization according to these theories is difficult, because authors tend to mix… Read More ›
Although contemporary South Africa is seldom mentioned or referred to explicitly in most of J. M. Coetzee’s (born 9 February 1940) novels, the land and the concerns of that country permeate his works. One may see this indirect approach as… Read More ›
Until 1991, when the last of South Africa’s apartheid laws was repealed, to be personally liberated and to be South African was to be doomed to a continuing struggle between the desire for further freedom and development for oneself and… Read More ›
Carson McCullers’s (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) fiction has a childlike directness, a disconcerting exposure of unconscious impulses in conjunction with realistic detail. She is like the candid child who announces that the emperor in his new clothes… Read More ›
Two persistent themes animate all of Albert Camus’s writing and underlie his artistic vision: One is the enigma of the universe, which is breathtakingly beautiful yet indifferent to life; the other is the enigma of man, whose craving for happiness… Read More ›
William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997) did not begin writing seriously until 1950, although he had unsuccessfully submitted a story titled “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” to Esquire in 1938. His first novelistic effort, Queer, which deals with homosexuality, was not published… Read More ›
A masterwork of American pluralism, Ellison’s (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) Invisible Man insists on the integrity of individual vocabulary and racial heritage while encouraging a radically democratic acceptance of diverse experiences. Ellison asserts this vision through the… Read More ›
Often described as America’s best contemporary novelist, Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005) earned enormous critical praise and a wide readership as well. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. His popularity is somewhat surprising, however, as his… Read More ›
James Baldwin’s (1924– 1987) public role as a major African American racial spokesman of the 1950’s and 1960’s guarantees his place in American cultural history. Though not undeserved, this reputation more frequently obscures than clarifies the nature of his literary… Read More ›
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