Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism


Andrić, Ivo | Celia Hawkesworth (essay date 1984)

Celia Hawkesworth (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Hawkesworth, Celia. “Devil's Yard.” In Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West, pp. 189-205. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Hawkesworth addresses Andrić's examination of the nature of art in The Devil's Yard.]

More than is the case with many of Andrić's other works, the sense of Devil's Yard1 depends closely on its intricate structure.

The composition is one that Andrić had used earlier for another story in the Brother Petar group: “Torso”. It is a system of concentric circles forming successive frames, focusing increasingly on the central point of the tale. The Petar stories in any case all have a similar outer frame, since each of them is explicitly the “story of a story”. Petar is a man with a particular gift for story-telling:

In everything he said there was something cheerful and wise at the same...

[The entire page is 6950 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.