M Ali's English Literature Notes

The Lion and the Jewel , an African play written in English, has paid attention  to the English speaking audiences in different countries. The play has brought together some features of African, more definitely Yoruba, theatrical tradition. At the same time, it communicates with elements of English theatre tradition. Soyinka ’s own words clarify his intention in the play, and single out one by one, the elements or features of African theatre tradition in the play: “African drama is sophisticated in idiom. Our forms of theatre are quite different from literary drama. We use spontaneous dialogue, folk music, simple stories, and relevant dances to express what we mean. Our theatre uses stylized forms into the drama of the English language.” ( Quoted in Nkosi,108)           The first and foremost quality of an African drama is its “spontaneous dialogue” which in the context means unprepared or extempore sentences spoken by the pe...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Chinua Achebe, the father of modern African literature, very aptly chooses the title and the epigraph of his novel Things Fall Apart from W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”  in order to adapt the process of the fall of traditional Igbo society and culture. Set in the 1890s, the novel carefully portrays, at first, the complex, advanced social institutions and artistic traditions of Igbo culture; next, its contact with Europeans; and finally the falling apart of the traditional Igbo culture. At the first part of the novel, Achebe presents the Igbo society as harmonious, coherent and peaceful and illustrates various aspects of the traditional way of life of the Ibo people. Don C. Ohadike writes of the pre-colonial condition of the Igbo people: Their major preoccupations were to live free from crime and sicknes...

Vidyadhar Suraj Prasad Naipaul, an expatriate from Trinidad, is a product of post-imperialist society whose primary business as a novelist is to project carefully the complex fate of individuals in a cross-cultural society. In his magnum opus, A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul deals with the problems of fragmentation, frustration, alienation, and exile, more definitely the identity crisis of an individual. The novel tells the story of its protagonist, Mr. Biswas from birth to death in different phases, and his problems of identity crisis. Born with six fingers, a symbol of bad luck for his father and family, Mohun feels an alien and an outsider even in his own family and in his own Indian world. Thus, Naipaul portrays the complexity of the relationship between a man and his origins and his inability to escape from it.  Yet Mohun searches for his own identity “I am just somebody. Nobody at all” (279). Unlike his father and brothers’ identity of labourers, Mr. Biswas’s ide...

R. K. Narayan is one of the postcolonial writers of India who are found to project the nation building attitude in their writings. His Waiting for the Mahatma , set in the surroundings of the writer’s created village Malgudi, is woven against the unconventional backdrop of the freedom movement. But in spite of using directly the national experience as the central theme as did Raja Rao, Narayan puts it in the background giving preference to the personal narrative. Krishna Mohan Pandey rightly observes           Rao depicts Gandhi’s impact on community but Nrayan focuses on             individuals.   Again, motivated by the national feelings, he is conscious to present the after independence situation of the country. However, this consciousness make many to note that “R. K. Narayan's novel Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) reflects a certain ambivalence towards the freedom movement.” (Aikant) In Waiti...