Do Works of Literary Merit Both Reflect the Spirit of the Time and Challenge It?

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Recommended: The complete persepolis ESSAY

One way that we gain knowledge about the past is through historical documents. However, literary works can also tell us a lot about the past and help expand our perspectives on a topic. Using stylistic features, authors manage to reflect and challenge the spirit of our time. Two writers that have managed to do that are Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart and Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis. Achebe manages to express and show the reader what times were like during African colonization and disputes the previous assumptions that Africans were wild animals. On the other hand, Satrapi takes the audience on a journey of Iran’s revolution and challenges the idea that the religious regime should be kept in power.

To begin with, the novel Things Fall Apart was written in 1958 by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian writer. During this time, most of Africa was still under colonialist rule; however, in the novel, Achebe focuses on the early experiences of colonialism in the late 1800’s. The story of Okonkwo allows the reader to learn about the clash of cultures during colonialism and reflects th...

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