Death and the King's Horseman

Place on List:

III. Period: 1960 - 2009

4. Primary Texts: Drama

Wole Soyinka. Death and the King's Horseman. (1975)

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_the_King%27s_Horseman

2. http://www.enotes.com/death-kings-horseman

3. Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

Olakunle George

Representations , No. 67 (Summer, 1999), pp. 67-91

Published by: University of California Press

Article DOI: 10.2307/2902887

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2902887

4. The Structural Coherence of Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horseman"

Craig McLuckie

College Literature , Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring, 2004), pp. 143-163

Published by: College Literature

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115195

5. Birch, Dinah. "Soyinka, Wole." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013 .

The following references the writer and not the text specifically.

“Soyinka, Wole (1934– ) Nigerian novelist, poet, and playwright, educated at the universities of Ibadan and Leeds. He was play reader at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where his The Swamp Dwellers (1958), The Lion and the Jewel, and The Invention (both 1959) were produced. These already demonstrated his development from simple village comedies to a more complex and individual drama incorporating mime and dance. After his return to Nigeria in 1960, university posts and the opportunity of producing and acting in his own plays gave him the self‐confidence to undertake even more daring innovations, for instance in A Dance of the Forests (1960), a half‐satirical, half‐fantastic celebration of Nigerian independence. Soyinka's first novel, The Interpreters (1965), captures the idealism of young Nigerians regarding the development of a new Africa, possibly anticipating a new Biafra. In prison for pro‐Biafran activity during 1967–9, he produced increasingly bleak verse and prose, Madmen and Specialists (1970), his second novel, Season of Anomy (1973), and The Man Died (1972), a prison memoir. His translation of the Bacchae of Euripides was commissioned by and performed at the National Theatre in 1973. Death and the King's Horseman (1975) embodied his post‐Biafran cultural philosophy, enunciated in Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), of the need for the aesthetics of Africa and Europe to cross‐fertilize each other. Another bleak period, coloured by the deteriorating political situation in Nigeria, followed this patch of optimism: later works include the drama A Play of Giants (1984), savagely portraying a group of African ex‐dictators taking refuge in New York, and The Open Sore of a Continent (1996), denouncing the military regime in Nigeria, and the brutal execution in November 1995 of Nigerian writer and political activist Ken Saro‐Wiwa. Soyinka himself had his Nigerian passport confiscated in 1994, and has since lived abroad, largely in the USA, while continuing actively to campaign for human rights. His account of his childhood, Aké (1981), is witty and celebratory; he continues the story in Isara (1989) and published a long memoir in 2006, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986.”

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