Recent Posts - page 18
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Analysis of Bei Dao’s The Answer
The Answer Debasement is the password of the base, Nobility the epitaph of the noble. See how the gilded sky is covered With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead. The Ice Age is over now, Why is there ice… Read More ›
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Analysis of Harry Martinson’s Aniara
It may seem strange that a poet known primarily for his nature writing would win a Nobel Prize in 1974 for a long narrative poem that narrates the nuclear destruction of the world and its aftermath. But Harry Martinson’s literary… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alfonsina Storni’s Ancestral Weight
“Ancestral Weight” (“Peso ancestral”), published in Alfonsina Storni’s second poetry collection and sometimes translated as “Ancestral Burden,” provides a historical dimension to the expression of tensions between the genders evident in her early works, even as it belies the claim… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kamau Brathwaite’s Ancestors
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy Ancestors (2001) consists of three poems: Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987). Brathwaite began Mother Poem while back in Barbados for the first time in almost 20 years. He recounts the realization that… Read More ›
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Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Amor America
Neruda begins all of Canto General with “Amor America (1400),” in the opening section titled A Lamp of Earth. The significance of the year 1400 is that it marks a time before the arrival of Christopher Columbus or any other… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor
Altazor, a coinage derived from “alto” (high) and “azor” (hawk), the work identified by its recent English translator as Huidobro’s masterpiece, interrogates both the nature of the modern poet and his lofty aspirations. Despite its importance, however, Altazor is also… Read More ›
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Analysis of Chinweizu’s Admonition to the Black World
“Admonition to the Black World” begins with four prose paragraphs that summarize 25 centuries of foreign assault on Africa. Chinweizu thus gives his spectacular, 21-page prophetic harangue a historical and ideological context. Before the poem proper, readers are reminded that… Read More ›
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Analysis of David Diop’s Africa
Africa my Africa Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs Africa of whom my grandmother sings On the banks of the distant river I have never known you But your blood flows in my veins Your beautiful black blood that… Read More ›
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The Blues
The literature on the blues, and to a somewhat lesser extent that on gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul, is of considerable interest to the jazz student. It also has a specialized readership of its own. As an ingredient of… Read More ›
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Slave Narrative
A slave narrative is an account of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally. Slave narratives comprise one of the most influential traditions… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
The story of a disillusionment with respect to a misunderstood marriage, this novel of psychological realism is cast in the form of the recollections—with the full force of hindsight—of John Dowell, a wealthy American who has lost his wife, Florence,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour
Set in the Anglo-Irish world of “great houses” during their days of waning influence in the first half of the 20th century, this satire attacks the emotional frigidity of a society that has allowed propriety and decorum to replace sincerity… Read More ›
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Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
An innovative and experimental novel that broke new ground in terms of both form and content, The Golden Notebook was identified as a manifesto of feminism when it was published, but the author’s examination of the protagonist’s life has even… Read More ›
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Analysis of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass
The first volume of a trilogy collectively entitled His Dark Materials, this fantasy novel introduces Lyra Belacqua, a girl on the threshold of adolescence. Lyra lives in Oxford under the careless supervision of scholars associated with Lord Asriel. Readers familiar… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
One of the greatest of Henry James’s prolific output of novels, The Golden Bowl focuses on the relationship between a widower, Adam Verver, and his daughter, Maggie. The Ververs are wealthy Americans, freed for a life of cultivated leisure by… Read More ›
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Analysis of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between
In 1953, this novel—Hartley’s seventh—received the Heinemann Foundation Prize; it is widely regarded as Hartley’s best novel. In 1971, director Joseph Losey chose it for a film adaptation with a screenplay by the noted British dramatist Harold Pinter. The film… Read More ›
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Analysis of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means
The third-person narrator of this novel follows the lives of several young women living in the May of Teck Club in London during World War II and of the young men who take an interest in them. The May of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl
A story that captures the changing sexual mores of the 1960s, Georgy Girl contrasts the choices two roommates make as birth control expands the range of options women have in their personal lives. Georgina Parkin is the daughter of Ted… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian Fleming From Russia, with Love
The fifth installment in the ongoing saga of adventures featuring the consummate spy James Bond, this novel helped make the series an international phenomenon when, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy named it as one of his favorite books. As… Read More ›
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Freudian Criticism
Sigmund Freud’s theories of the personality and the unconscious mind received international attention in his lifetime as psychoanalysis became an accepted method of treating emotional disorders. Freud’s ideas rather quickly became the basis of an approach to literary criticism that… Read More ›
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