Psychoanalysis in Literary Criticism

Here is a piquing reminder that life is more than the surface and the apparent. The painstaking outlining and underlining of this reality in twenty-six divergent vicarious life instances of plays, novels, and short stories bespeak the punctual verity of complex reality. The value, in this is the repeated lesson in those many instances that should serve as hands-own, nay, hand-guiding assistance in spotting and explicating the underpinnings of psychoanalytical realities in works of art, and then, in daily life. The examples are meticulously delineated and simply but very intelligently explicated. This is then a handbook of psychoanalytical criticism, a practical guide, a referential trove where to sight and cite the inner makings of deeper human action. Students of all departments, and indeed everybody, needs to reap from this rich offer from a practised hand and mind in order to make profounder and truer meaning of the goings-on in human activity.

John Niba Ndongmanji hails from Bafut in the North West Region of Cameroon. He holds a Ph.D in English from the University of Yoaunde I. He has an impressive forty-six-year teaching career (High School teaching at Obala, 1979 – 1988 and in The University of Bamenda, 1988 – 2025, where he chaired the English Modern Letters Department, and later held the of􀏐ice of Deputy Director of Higher Teacher Training College of the University of Bamenda. Presently, he teaches grammar, articulatory phonetics, and literature in John Mary Vianney Spiritual Centre Bafut, an engagement begun in 1999. His acclaimed publications include: Introduction to Modern Drama, Literature in Psychoanalytic Criticism, The Sounds of English: A focus on Pronunciation, The Basics of Traditional Grammar, The Challenges of Communication in English: A Focus on the Sentence, and Pocket Grammar. Psychoanalytic criticism, gender/feminist studies, Postcolonial and English Literature constitute his research interest.