Author Archives
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Analysis of Milan Kundera’s Novels
None of Milan Kundera’s novels fits into the traditional concept of the novel. Each is an experimental foray into the unknown, although well prepared and supported by the literary legacy of Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Vancura. This is particularly… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Novels
The “Dickens World,” as Humphrey House calls it, is one of sharp moral contrast, a world in which the selfseeking— imprisoned in their egotism—rub shoulders with the altruistic, freed from the demands of self by concern for others; a world… Read More ›
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Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Novels
It was a matter of some pleasure to Samuel Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) that his work resists explication. His most important novels and plays are artfully constructed contemplations on their own form rather than commentaries on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s Novels
Analysis Simone de Beauvoir’s novels are grounded in her training as a philosopher and in her sociological and feminist concerns. She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, All Men Are Mortal, and The Mandarins all revolve around the questions… Read More ›
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Analysis of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Many critics maintain that the impulse that prompted Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) to begin his great novel was a satiric one: He desired to satirize chivalric romances. As the elderly Alonso Quixano the Good (if that is his… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jane Austen’s Novels
Jane Austen’s (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) novels—her “bits of ivory,” as she modestly and perhaps half-playfully termed them—are unrivaled for their success in combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously conscious of her artistry… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Novels
The individualism and richness of Charlotte Brontë’s (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) work arise from the multiple ways in which Brontë’s writing is personal: observation and introspection, rational analysis and spontaneous emotion, accurate mimesis and private symbolism. Tension… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bessie Head’s Novels
Bessie Head’s (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) writing occupies a transitional place in African literature between the domestic, village-centered writing of the 1950’s and 1960’s and the more overtly political and urban writing—much of it written by exiles in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Novels
The name Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) conjures up images of a world without a center, of people alienated both from society and from themselves. Kafka lived at the threshold of the modern technological world, and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is constructed around a series of dialectic motifs that interconnect and unify the elements of setting, character, and plot. An examination of these motifs will give the reader the clearest insight into the central meaning of the novel…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Novels
Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013) is probably both the most widely known and the most representative African novelist. He may very well have written the first African novel of real literary merit—such at least is the opinion of Charles Larson—and he deals… Read More ›
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Young Adult Fiction Works and Writers
A distinctive literature about childhood has existed since the Victorian era, but not so about adolescence as a stage of life with its own integrity, concerns, and distinct problems. Teachers, librarians, and parents argue that the classics of world literature… Read More ›
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Fantasy Novels and Novelists
The term “fantasy” refers to all works of fiction that attempt neither the realism of the realistic novel nor the “conditional realism” of science fiction. Among modern critics, the primacy of the realistic novel is taken for granted. Realistic novels… Read More ›
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Science-Fiction Novels and Novelists
The emergence of the “modern” novel in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on narrative realism and its intimate involvement with the affairs of everyday life, is correlated with a gradual separation between mundane and imaginative fiction, a crucial breaking… Read More ›
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Psychological Novels and Novelists
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 ›
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Picaresque Novels and Novelists
The Spanish words picaresque and picaro achieved currency in Spain shortly after 1600. Today they are terms in literary criticism, sometimes misused because of the vague meaning attached to them. The revival of the genre in the twentieth century was… Read More ›
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Modern Novels and Novelists
One way to understand the modern novel is to show its development in the work of writers such as Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner. This list is by no means exclusive, but… Read More ›
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Postmodern Novels and Novelists
Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer… Read More ›
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Self-Reflexive Novels and Novelists
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 ›
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Gay and Lesbian Novels and Novelists
Homosexuality, traditionally regarded as a disease or perversion by church, state, and society, was rigorously denounced and condemned by those same institutions. In the case of the arts and literature, works featuring homoeroticism or gays and lesbians as characters were… Read More ›
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