Cry, the Beloved Country - 9781604135831

Set in South Africa before the adoption of apartheid, Alan Paton's classic novel presents a family and a nation struggling to embrace change and resist the harmful effects of violence, apathy, and inequality. This new edition gathers a range of essential critical commentary on the work and features an introduction by scholar Harold Bloom.

Paton had a tragic grasp of the way good and evil are interwoven in human history. In Arthur Jarvis he created a character who understood the inevitability of civilizational progress and expansion and the conflict and loss that they bring. At the same time, Arthur insists that the colonizers take responsibility for the damage they have done.---Carol Iannone

In Cry, the Beloved Country...Paton is at pains to make clear that the mere verbalisation of liberal sentiments is not enough, and that these sentiments need to be accompanied by meaningful action at the level of the economic and political structures and conditions of society.---Andrew Foley

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.