V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

John Parras (William Paterson University)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 4.1.1: Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean.
Vol. editors: Ronald Cummings (McMaster University), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin), Jak Peake (University of Essex), Abigail Ward (University of Nottingham)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1979

Places

United Kingdom (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River was first published in 1979, after Naipaul had firmly established his considerable reputation—one that would lead to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Treating such topics as the cultural interdependence of Africa and Europe, the influence of ideology and ethnicity on an individual's identity, and the complexities of African nationhood following independence from Belgian colonial rule, the novel grapples with weighty post-colonial themes in an undaunted manner for which Naipaul has been both praised and bitterly criticized.

The novel is set in Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1553 words

Citation: Parras, John. "A Bend in the River". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 October 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7260, accessed 22 November 2024.]

Save this article