[With] some thought, the sources of irritation [in Charles Larson's book] become manifold. First, there is the title itself—The Emergence of African Fiction—which indicates a scope not attempted. African fiction is not merely African prose literature since World War II, because fictional arts existed in Africa since traditional times. Neither did African fiction in European languages emerge only after World War II; such fiction goes back to the 1880's in Portuguese Africa…...

[In The Novel in the Third World, a] collection of essays on ten representative novels from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Papua New Guinea, and the Black and Native American communities in the United States, Larson proposes an evolutionary schema according to which third-world fiction can be defined in terms of its common characteristics, and not in terms of its relationship to Western literary models. Based primarily on narrative content, this schema distinguishes various stages in a process which has pres...

[American Indian Fiction] is the first book-length study of fiction written by American Indians. Larson treats novels by twelve authors: Simon Pokagon, John M. Okison, John J. Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Dallas Chief Eagle, Hyemeyohsts Storm, Denton Bedford, George Pierre, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Nasnaga. Though the book is titled American Indian Fiction, Larson discusses only novels, ignoring the fine short fiction of Simon Ortiz, Leslie Silko, and others for plodding d...

The title of [Charles Larson's] pioneering study [American Indian Fiction] is somewhat misleading, for Larson intends a discussion of novels only, not shorter fiction as well. One suspects this restriction owes to the author's self-admittedly brief acquaintance with imaginative literature written by Native Americans. Unfortunately, the limitation leads the author into generalizations based upon but 16 works, from Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods (1899) to Leslie Silko's Ceremon...

[The] steady superiority of Professor Larson [in The Emergence of African Fiction] is a reflection of his real familiarity with both classical and contemporary fiction, and of his finer critical judgment. The former prevents him from applying some strict and inappropriate notion of the "proper" novel to the material before him, while the latter enables him to look carefully at what is actually present in the work under review. Thus he makes some really interesting observations on the relative ...

["The Insect Colony"] is about useless Americans scratching at each other in West Africa…. [The] characters are afflicted by irresponsibility and a sense of alienation;… illicit sex is the spring that propels the narrative…. [Larson] conveys the illegitimacy of his characters' presence in a landscape that has no need of them, that they cannot even profitably exploit. It occurs to Hunter Schuld, toward the end of his sojourn in a remote village of Cameroon, that he a...

Surprisingly—because we tend to dismiss critics turned novelist—The Insect Colony is a fine novel. Larson has a novelist's sensibility. He uses various novelistic techniques such as split narration, varying levels of perception, movement through time zones and the ending of every chapter with a startling revelation or question. Hunter Schuld, an entomologist, has returned to West Africa to study spiders. Metaphorically, everybody gets caught in a web of connections—an image Larso...

[On a reading of] Academia Nuts, I am forced to the critical conclusion that Charles R. Larson … has been drinking coffee laced with rum. He needs to be warned away from that stuff; it is dangerous…. [This] is a very funny book that will get handed around every English department in the country with chortles and snickers and the occasional howl of glee. What I hope is that its public is not that limited, that everyone who has ever had to write An Interpretation of a Literary Work, or everyone ...

["Arthur Dimmesdale," a] recasting of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," from the viewpoint of the pusillanimous young minister, gets high marks for vision. However, so overwhelming is the convoluted psychic landscape of Minister Dimmesdale that the reader wilts under his vacillations and can only marvel that Hester aroused passion in such a one. Larson's version of the sin that Puritan Boston deemed a crime is forthright, differing from the studied ambiguity of the ...