Annales de l’université d’Alger
Volume 20, Numéro 2, Pages 18-35
2011-11-30

A Lawrentian Imagination For A View Of Fiction The Impact Of D. Lawrence On Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Authors : Salah Kaci- Mohamed .

Abstract

Ngugi's fiction is, in part, an outcome of the influence of Western – mainly Anglo-Saxon – writers. Ngugi acquired the rudiments of "the craft of fiction" by reading, either as part of colonial school curricula or out of his personal choosing, the writings of William Shakespeare, R. L. Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Blake, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and, last but not least, D. H. Lawrence. He himself argues that some of these works had a powerful impact on him, and, in practically all his books of essays and in many of his interviews and lectures, he suggests that his imaginative writings as well as his theories on culture, literature and language are developed in very close dialogical and intertextual relationships with them. Though to varied degrees and in ways that differ from one of his novels to another and from a set of them to another, all Ngugi's fiction, from Weep Not, Child to Wizard of the Crow, echoes such a background

Keywords

Ngugi ;Anglo-Saxon;the craft of fiction;Ezra Pound;Eliot;James Joyce;Joseph Conrad