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

This essay opens with an overview of the extant criticism of Soyinka's play. From the early paraphrases, through Marxist, mythic, and performance analyses, to authorial reflections on the play, Professor McLuckie leads into a new reading of the play centred on the idea of beginnings. McLuckie a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:College literature 2004-04, Vol.31 (2), p.143-163
Main Author: McLuckie, Craig
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Audiences
Authors
British literature
Colonialism
Criticism
Fathers
Foreign Culture
Funerary rituals
Mythology
Police
Religious rituals
Rituals
Soyinka, Wole (1934- )
Suicide
Theater
Theater criticism
Tragedy
Women
Word Processing
Writers
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Summary:This essay opens with an overview of the extant criticism of Soyinka's play. From the early paraphrases, through Marxist, mythic, and performance analyses, to authorial reflections on the play, Professor McLuckie leads into a new reading of the play centred on the idea of beginnings. McLuckie argues that the play's peritexts are central to our understanding of intertextuality as a structuring device, that structural coherence is dependent on the hybridization of beginnings, and that, as Breytenbach observes, beginnings/origins rejuvenate text and performance for the reader/spectator.
ISSN:0093-3139
1542-4286
1542-4286
DOI:10.1353/lit.2004.0023