Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - K. L. Goodwin (essay date 1991)
Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - K. L. Goodwin (essay date 1991)
K. L. Goodwin (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Goodwin, K. L. “‘Nationality-Chauvinism Must Burn’: Utopian Visions in Petals of Blood and Matigari.” Literary Criterion 26, no. 3 (1991): 1-14.
[In the following essay, Goodwin investigates Ngugi's blending of narrative forms in Petals of Blood and Matigari, arguing that both works move “effortlessly between realism, satire, farce, fantasy, and exhortation.”]
Commonwealth literature is not everyone's notion of a viable or useful category, and some may think that it smacks of postcolonial cultural imperialism, but it is a wider (if less precise) category than ‘world literature written in English’ and has the advantage of admitting regional and national literatures that would otherwise have to find shelter under the not-necessarily-appropriate umbrellas of the ‘third world’, ‘black’, ‘Asian’, or ‘Pacific’ writing. One does not have to...
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Criticism
- Roger A. Berger (essay date spring 1989)
- Richard Gibson (review date 16 June 1989)
- Carol M. Sicherman (essay date fall 1989)
- K. L. Goodwin (essay date 1991)
- Abdulrazak Gurnah (essay date winter 1991)
- David Maughan Brown (essay date winter 1991)
- Theodore Pelton (essay date March-April 1993)
- Christine Loflin (essay date winter 1995)
- Patrick Williams (essay date 1997)
- Steven Tobias (essay date spring 1997)
- Christopher Wise (essay date spring 1997)
- Nicholas Brown (essay date winter 1999)
- Simon Gikandi (essay date summer 2000)
- Helen Hayward (review date 15 March 2002)
- Bonnie Roos (essay date summer 2002)
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