Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture

African Nobel laureate Soyinka ( Ake: The Years of Childhood ) here assembles 19 erudite and outspoken essays on topics as diverse as the plays of Aristophanes; Shakespeare's influence on Arabic writers; and literary theorist Roland Barthes. Most of the pieces--and certainly the most impassioned and polemical of them--examine the conflicted state of African literature.