Browsing Literary Essays by Issue Date
Now showing items 1-20 of 45
-
Searching for Clues
(CRNLE, 2000)Review of 'Hymns for the Drowning', a novel by Christopher Cyrill. -
Those Difficult Years
(CRNLE, 2000)Review essay of 'Letters Between and Father and Son' and 'Reading and Writing: A Personal Account' by V.S. Naipaul. The letters of the Naipaul family are compared with the fictional version of events in 'A House for Mr Biswas'. -
Looking Back in Anger: The Transformations of Childhood Memories in V.S. Naipaul's 'A House for Mr Biswas' and Jamaica Kincaid's 'Annie John'
(Prestige Books, 2000)A comparison of the novels 'Annie John' by Jamaica Kincaid, set in Antigua, and 'A House for Mr Biswas' by V.S. Naipaul, set in Trinidad. Both novels build upon angry memories of childhood in a West Indian setting. -
Fiji: Republican Rome in the Pacific?
(CRNLE, 2000)Review of 'Fiji: Paradise in Pieces' by Satendra Nandan. -
Attitudes to Political Commitment in Three Indian Novels: Raja Rao's 'Kanthapura', Khushwant Singh's 'Train to Pakistan' and Nayantara Sahgal's 'Rich Like Us'
(Prestige Books, 2001)An examination of attitudes to political commitment portrayed by three Indian novels written in English, Raja Rao's 'Kanthapura', Khushwant Singh's 'Train to Pakistan' and Nayantara Sahgal's 'Rich Like Us'. -
Patterns of Communication in Roger Mais' 'Brother Man'
(Prestige Books, 2001)An analysis of patterns of communication in the Jamaican novel 'Brother Man' by Roger Mais. -
The Uses of Adversity: Matthew Flinders' Mauritius Writings
(Wakefield Press, 2002)A discussion of Matthew Flinders' 'Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim' and of an extended journal entry, both written while he was detained on Mauritius. -
My Evening Song
(Wakefield Press, 2002)A discussion of the song Matthew Flinders wrote for his wife Ann while detained on Mauritius. -
Alien and Adrift: The Diasporic Consciousness in V.S. Naipaul’s 'Half a Life' and J.M. Coetzee's 'Youth'
(New Literatures Review, 2003)In this paper, I look at some similarities in sensibility of Naipaul and Coetzee, one clearly a diasporic writer and the other less identifiably so, as expressed in these two recent books. I discuss to what extent their ... -
The Horizon Conquerors: Post-war London through Colonial Eyes.
(New Literatures Review, 2003)Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul both arrived in London a few years after the end of the Second World War. This paper looks at their perceptions of the city as 'colonials', as seen from their fiction and non-fiction writings. -
Iris Murdoch’s Use of First-Person Narrative in The Black Prince
(English Studies, 2004-04)Many critics place Iris Murdoch’s first-person novels, narrated by a more or less egotistical and unperceptive male who is also the protagonist, near the summit of her achievement as a novelist, and most agree that The ... -
An Interview with Marion Halligan
(Antipodes, 2004-06)Marion Halligan has won awards for her novels, essays and short stories. She has published fifteen books including, most recently, the novels The Fog Garden and The Point. Born and raised in the New South Wales industrial ... -
The Post-War Novel in Crisis: Three Perspectives
(AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language & Literature Association, 2005-11)Three major novelists of the period following the second world war, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul, have pondered the question of why the post-war novel is unable to achieve the heights of its nineteenth-century ... -
Naipaul's Women.
(South Asian Review., 2005-11)V.S. Naipaul's three novels of the 1970s (In a Free State, Guerrillas and A Bend in the River) earned him a reputation as a misogynist. The only sustained critical examination of women in his fiction came in the late ... -
An Autobiography of Everyone? Intentions and Definitions in Doris Lessing’s “Memoirs of a Survivor”. [abstract].
(2006)"Memoirs of a Survivor" was first published in 1974, and is the second of what Lessing has described as her “unrealistic stories”. The “real” setting of the novel is an unnamed English city in the near future, when for ... -
Doris Lessing Versus Her Readers: The Case of 'The Golden Notebook'
(Prestige Books, New Delhi, 2006)Doris Lessing is a major force in contemporary English literature, holding a unique position as an iconoclastic, outspoken critic of society and politics with a sage-like, almost magisterial status. However, she has not ... -
Getting to Know Matthew: A Personal Account of Editing Flinders' Private Journal.
(L'Harmattan, 2006) -
Review of Patrick French, 'The World is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul'.
(South Asian Review, 2007)Review of Patrick French, 'The World is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul'. -
‘What trouble I have with Jane Austen!’ V.S. Naipaul’s blind spot.
(Victorian Association for the Teaching of English,, 2008)In an April 2006 interview with Farrukh Dhondy in the Literary Review, V.S. Naipaul spoke disdainfully of Jane Austen, labelling her writing as 'nonsensical' and directed solely at 'those people who wish to be educated in ... -
Naipaul’s ‘Fraudulent’ London Novel: Mr Stone and the Knights Companion
(Journal of Contemporary Literature., 2009)An examination of V.S. Naipaul's 1963 novel 'Mr Stone and the Knights Companion' which Naipaul later described as 'fraudulent' because of the suppression of his personal point of view. It is compared to other works of the ...