SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. Review of Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, by Wole Soyinka. World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (autumn 1989): 730.

In the following review, Thorpe offers a positive assessment of Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, calling the work “a rare, vigorous, and cogent writer's apologia.”

The nineteen essays and addresses—seven previously published—collected in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage span some twenty years. Their complexity and multifarious interest are succinctly pointed out in Biodun Jeyifo's excellent introduction by his characterization of Wole Soyinka as both mythopoeist and mythoclast: “variously traditional and modernist, pan-Africanist and liberal-humanist, individualistic and communalistic, gnostic and sceptical, unapologetically idealist and yet on occasion discreetly materialist.”

Soyinka himself chose the three-pronged title, and it is the “outrage” that many readers will know least well. Apart from criticizing even such advocates as Moore and Lindfors, in several places Soyinka contests...