Read complete books and articles on: V. S. Naipaul

Naipaul, V. S. - (Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul)nīpôlˈ, 1932–, English author, b. Chaguanas, Trinidad; grad. University College, Oxford, 1953. Naipul, whose family is descended from Indian Brahmins, has lived in England since 1950. A master of English prose style, he is known for his penetrating analyses of alienation and exile. In fiction and essays marked by stylistic virtuosity and psychological insight, he often focuses on his childhood and his travels beyond Trinidad. Writing with increasing irony and pessimism, he has often bleakly detailed the dual problems of the Third World: the oppressions of colonialism and the chaos of postcolonialism.

Among Naipaul's works of international analysis are The Middle Passage (1962), about the West Indies and South America, and an Indian trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). His novels include The Mystic Masseur (1957), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), In a Free State (1971; Booker Prize), Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979), and Half a Life (2001), and he has also written numerous short stories. Among his other works are The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994), autobiographical works combining novel, memoir, and history; Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), analyses of modern Islam; and many political essays, a representative sample of which are collected in The Writer and the World (2002). Naipaul was knighted in 1990 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

See his early letters in Between Father and Son: Family Letters (2000), ed. by G. Aitken; F. Jussawalla, ed., Conversations with V. S. Naipaul (1997); biographies by R. D. Hamner (1973) and R. Kelly (1989); studies by P. Theroux (1972 and 1998), R. D. Hamner, ed. (1979), P. Nightingale (1987), P. Hughes (1988), T. F. Weiss (1992), W. Dissanayake (1993), B. A. King (1993), J. Levy (1995), F. Mustafa (1995), R. Nixon (1997), N. Ramadevi (1997), A. J. Khan (1998), and L. Feder (2000).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: V. S. Naipaul

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

V.S. Naipaul and the West Indies » Read Now
by Dolly Zulakha Hassan. 378 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...V.S. Naipaul and the West Indies American University...Main Paris Dolly Zulakha Hassan V.S. Naipaul and the West Indies PETER LANG...Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hassan...
2.

After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie » Read Now
by Michael Edward Gorra. 207 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire--Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie--have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on...
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In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire--Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie--have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar--a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity--and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.
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3.

V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate, in College Literature » Read Now
by Graham Huggan. 7 pgs.

Collections: Education, Literature, Entire Library

...V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate...mine, working at the time on a thesis on V. S. Naipaul, and exasperated at the lack of help she...Warburg, 1986 ...
4.

Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (includes "V. S. Naipaul: History as Cosmic Irony," "Voice in Exile: 'Journey' in Raja Rao and V. S. Naipaul," and more) » Read Now
by Emmanuel S. Nelson. 186 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Adopting the concept of diaspora to the experience of people of Indian subcontinental origin dispersed in other areas, Nelson uses this paradigm to analyze Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, he has commissioned fourteen critical essays that examine such diverse areas of the diaspora as the...
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Adopting the concept of diaspora to the experience of people of Indian subcontinental origin dispersed in other areas, Nelson uses this paradigm to analyze Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, he has commissioned fourteen critical essays that examine such diverse areas of the diaspora as the South Pacific, the Caribbean, Singapore, Britain, North America, and Africa and such representative writers as Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Kamala Markandaya, Bharati Mukherjee, and Raja Rao. Underlying this international body of literature is the haunting presence of India and the anguish of personal loss that generate an aesthetics of "reworlding."
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5.

Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945 (includes "V. S. Naipaul: From Satire and Society to Politics") » Read Now
by Robert Boyers. 255 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Working deliberately against the grain of assumptions dominant in the contemporary literary academy, Boyers examines novels by Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and others, arguing that it is necessary to speak of character, ethics, and philosophic purpose if one is to understand...
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Working deliberately against the grain of assumptions dominant in the contemporary literary academy, Boyers examines novels by Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and others, arguing that it is necessary to speak of character, ethics, and philosophic purpose if one is to understand these works. A penetrating study, Atrocity and Amnesia illuminates some of the major fiction of our time and makes an important contribution to contemporary political thought.
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6.

The Forged Feature: Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty: New and Selected Essays (includes "The Heraldry of Accommodation: A House for Mr. Naipaul") » Read Now
by Ben Belitt. 284 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

ôSpellbinding book. . . . The essays deserve to be read and reread at the slowest, most appreciative pace possible.ö -Boston Review The scope of The Forged Feature is two-fold: to bring together a representative selection of critical essays bearing on Belitt's interests as poet, critic, teacher...
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ôSpellbinding book. . . . The essays deserve to be read and reread at the slowest, most appreciative pace possible.ö -Boston Review The scope of The Forged Feature is two-fold: to bring together a representative selection of critical essays bearing on Belitt's interests as poet, critic, teacher, and translator; and to furnish an on-going review of his concern with the encoding of languages and the exigencies of their imaginative retrieval. The collection begins with three pieces on the uses of belief, linguistic and place as shaping forces in the concretizing of the literary artifact. The second section of essays examines the fictive medium in terms of a number of "predicaments." The discussion embraces texts such as parables, novels, and autobiographical meoirs covering a broad range of twentieth century talents: Kafka, Borges, V.S. Naipaul, Saul Bellows, and Pablo Neruda. The third section is devoted to the theory and practice of translation developed from Belitt's personal lifetime of experience. Finally, there is a sequence of four essays on the uses of "new physics" of quantum mechanics and its uncanny relevance to the accountability of poetry. Belitt re-evaluates Gerard Manley Hopkins as a "scientific" rather than a priestly crafter of a medium, and touches upon diverse traditions and talents such as Keats, Blake, Stevens, Bishop, Yeats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, W.C. Williams, Michado, Rilke, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. The brilliant observations collected in this volume are not contained within a specific school of thought and are indefinable within any current fashion- rather, Belitt's frame of reference is literature itself and his essays proceed in a literary, poetic, and individual voice.
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7.

Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men, in Twentieth Century Literature » Read Now
by Robert M. Greenberg. 24 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipauls Political Fiction: The Case of...by ROBERT M. GREENBERG V. S. Naipauls fiction and nonfiction since the...down once, hell do it...
8.

Race and the Figures of History in Naipaul's an Area of Darkness, in Critique » Read Now
by Ashish Roy. 23 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...UNIVERSITY OF DELHI NOTES 1 V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (New York...1978 ) 86-91; Sudha Rai, V. S. Naipaul: A Study in Expatriate Sensibility...Darkness by Michael...
9.

Claiming the Burden: Naipaul's Africa, in Research in African Literatures » Read Now
by Ranu Samantrai. 13 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...informs the neocolonial vision of V. S. Naipaul, perhaps the most widely read contemporary...Hardwick, Elizabeth. "Meeting V. S. Naipaul". New York Times Book Review 13 May...
10.

The Garden Trampled: Or, the Liquidation of African Culture in V.S. Naipaul's a Bend in the River, in College Literature » Read Now
by Christopher Wise. 15 pgs.

Collections: Education, Literature, Entire Library

...Liquidation of African Culture in V.S. Naipauls A Bend in the River CHRISTOPHER...impact on both Chinua Achebe and V.S. Naipaul has been copiously documented by...Rob Nixon...
11.

Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel (includes "Metaphysics and Materialism: Wilson Harris and V. S. Naipaul") » Read Now
by Glyne A. Griffith. 152 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...MATERIALISM: WILSON HARRIS AND V. S. NAIPAUL / 53 CHAPTER...example, and the criticism of a V. S. Naipaul or a Kenneth Ramchand. The history...ontology" in the same way...
12.

An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20-Century Literature (includes "V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott") » Read Now
by Sven Birkerts. 430 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
13.

Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another (includes "Derek Walcott on V. S. Naipaul") » Read Now
by Ilan Stavans. 332 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/ South divide have had little interest in the work of...
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It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/ South divide have had little interest in the work of their counterparts. With Mutual Impressions Ilan Stavans dispels these notions by showing how solid the bridges between writers and across borders have been -- at least since the early days of this century -- and how crucial they are likely to become as we enter the next millennium.
Divided into symmetrical halves -- South reading North and North reading South -- the book presents essays by leading novelists, poets, and other writers that focus on the work of another literary figure from across the divide. Borges, for example, finds in Hawthorne the perfect precursor to his own interest in allegories; Katherine Anne Porter examines Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi as a rascal whose picaresque views of life in The Itching Parrot served to launch the Latin American novel; Cortazar's study of the plots and style of Poe show an affinity that left an indelible mark on the Argentine's short fiction; Susan Sontag views Machado de Assis as the ultimate mirror, a proto-postmodernist.
With other essays by Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, John Barth, Robert Coover, Pedro Henriquez Urena, Grace Paley, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Mark Strand, among others, Mutual Impressions offers a remarkable view of the connections that comprise a literary tradition of the Americas. It is a book that will surprise and enliven its readers as it informs and awakensin them a sense of wonder.
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14.

Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook » Read Now
by Daryl Cumber Dance. 532 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

"Even when available elsewhere, information on these 50 English-language authors is sparse; the in-depth treatment here includes biography, description of major works and themes, summary of critical reception, and an exhaustive bibliography of works by and about each author. Both academic and public...
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"Even when available elsewhere, information on these 50 English-language authors is sparse; the in-depth treatment here includes biography, description of major works and themes, summary of critical reception, and an exhaustive bibliography of works by and about each author. Both academic and public libraries will want to accept this invitation to another world." Library Journal
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