Author Archives
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Analysis of Angela Carter’s Novels
The search for self and for autonomy is the underlying theme of most of Angela Carter’s ) ( 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992), fiction. Her protagonists, usually described as bored or in some other way detached from their… Read More ›
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Analysis of Buchi Emecheta’s Novels
Buchi Emecheta’s (21 July 1944 – 25 January 2017) novels deal principally with the life experiences of Nigerian women, who are subordinated in an indigenous society deeply influenced by the Western values introduced by British colonists. Other Nigerian women, those… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Novels
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 ›
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Analysis of Anita Brookner’s Novels
Anita Brookner (16 July 1928 – 10 March 2016) established her reputation as a novelist with four books published in rapid succession from 1981 to 1984. Written in austerely elegant prose, each of these four novels follows essentially the same… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Novels
The fictional world of Mario Vargas Llosa is one of complex novels, of murals of characters, of actions whose significance the reader must determine, of vast edifices that aspire to become total realities. Vargas Llosa’s vision of reality is consistently… Read More ›
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Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Novels
Like other novelists in Africa during the years just before and after independence, Wole Soyinka faced the question of ethnic and cultural identity. The now notorious negritude movement, begun in the 1930’s, had attempted to promote a pan-African identity by… Read More ›
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Analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s Novels
Leo Tolstoy’s literary works may be viewed as repeated assaults on Romantic conventions. His view, expressed numerous times throughout his diary, was that such conventions blind both writer and reader to reality. Thus, his goal was to construct a new… Read More ›
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Analysis of Iris Murdoch’s Novels
A knowledge of Iris Murdoch’s (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) philosophical and critical essays is invaluable for the reader wishing to understand her fiction. Her moral philosophy, which entails a rejection of existentialism, behaviorism, and linguistic empiricism, informs… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Novels
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (born 5 January 1938) fiction, like that of many contemporary African novelists, is highly political: It portrays the traumatic transition from colonized culture to an independent African society. His novels illustrate with unmatched clarity the problems created by… Read More ›
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Analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s Novels
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 ›
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Analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s Novels
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 ›
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Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s Novels
In The Courage to Be (1952), Paul Tillich asserts that “the decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the twentieth century is the loss of God in the nineteenth century.” Most critics of… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s Novels
D. H. Lawrence occupies an ambiguous position with respect to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and the other major figures of the modernist movement. While on one hand he shared their feelings of gloom about the degeneration of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Haruki Murakami’s Novels
If it is true that writers and artists should spend their entire lives and careers investigating, examining, and trying to understand the same themes, then Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a prime example of how to do this… Read More ›
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Analysis of Günter Grass’s Novels
Although Günter Grass’s (1927 – 2015) novel The Tin Drum forms the first part of the Danzig Trilogy and shares some characters, events, and themes with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, the novel was conceived independently and can be discussed… Read More ›
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Analysis of Albert Camus’s Novels
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 ›
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Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels
A common link among Kazuo Ishiguro’s (born 8 November 1954) novels is the prominence of the first-person narrator, through whose meandering thoughts the story unfolds. Readers soon discover, however, that these central voices are rather unreliable in their accounts of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anita Desai’s Novels
Anita Desai’s (born 24 June 1937) novels reveal certain recurring patterns in plots, settings, and characterizations. The plots of her novels fuse two opposing propensities—one toward the gothic mystery and the other toward the philosophical novel. The gothic orientation, which Desai… Read More ›
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Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Novels
Many Western readers, ignorant of Islam and Hinduism, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and the Pakistani civil war of 1974, may tend to read Salman Rushdie’s (born 19… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s Novels
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) denies that the fictional world he describes in his novels is a world of fantasy. In an article about fantasy and artistic creation in Latin America, he concludes: “Reality is a better writer than… Read More ›
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