SUMMARIES IN CAPSULE FORMAT

SOME USEFUL WORKS: SUMMARIES IN CAPSULE FORMAT

📔 The Lion and the Jewel

 🔻Play by Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka which was first performed in 1959. 

🔻It chronicles how Baroka, the lion fights with the modern Lakunle over the right to marry Sidi, the titular Jewel. 

🔻Lakunle is portrayed as the civilized antithesis of Baroka and unilaterally attempts to modernize his community and change its social conventions for no reason other than the fact that he can. 

🔻The transcript of the play was first published in 1962 by Oxford University Press. 

🔻Soyinka emphasises the theme of the corrupted African culture through the play, as well as how the youth should embrace the original African culture.

📔 The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities

🔻Book by James Thurber first published in 1931 by Harper and Brothers.

🔻It collects a number of short humorous pieces, most of which had appeared in The New Yorker, and an introduction by E. B. White.

🔻Part One: Mr and Mrs Monroe

A number of short stories featuring the Mr and Mrs Monroe and which contain many autobiographical elements.

🔻Part Two: The Pet Department

"Inspired by the daily pet column in the New York Evening Post" and consisting of a number of short question and answers, each illustrated by a Thurber drawing.

🔻Part Three: Ladies and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage "Inspired by Mr. H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage"

📔 The American Scholar

🔻Speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

🔻He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. 

🔻Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

📔 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature

🔻The 1989 Non-fiction book on postcolonialism, penned by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin.

🔻The title references Salman Rushdie's 1982 article "The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance". 

🔻In addition to being a pun on the film Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the phrase refers to the ways postcolonial voices respond to the literary canon of the colonial centre.

📔 The Fakeer of Jungheera

🔻Masterpiece creation byHenry Derozio. In his poems, he deals with the theme of patriotism, of love, of nature, of death. 

🔻The central theme of The Fakeer of Jungheera is the ignoble and in human practice of ‘sati’ in the contemporary orthodox Indian society.