The System of Dante’s Hell (Masterplots II: African American Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Amiri Baraka
- First Published: 1965
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Bildungsroman
- Time of Work: The early 1960’s
- Setting: Newark, New Jersey, and the American South
- Principal Characters: Roi, Peaches, Beverley, Leon Webster
- Genres: Long fiction, Autobiographical fiction
- Subjects: African Americans, Self-discovery, Twentieth century, Literature, Sin or Original sin, Armed forces
- Locales: Hell
The Novel
Discussing The System of Dante’s Hell in the light of conventional expectations regarding fictional form and content is misleading, since one of the fundamental effects the work seeks to achieve is to abolish such categories by showing them to be inadequate, suggesting thereby that they are irrelevant to the world that the author desires to depict. Rather than being a reliable narrative, the work reads as a series of variations on a scattered network of themes. As a result, the appeals to conflict and resolution that novels usually make are overridden in...
[The entire page is 3176 words long]
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