This study explores five major narratives of Ghanian-born novelist William Boyd from a satiric point of view. Boyd's novels and short stories take up some of the particular traits of satire, a genre which has gradually lost the impact it had in the eighteenth century. This book analyses the satiric spirit of four novels and one short story: A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War, Stars and Bars, Armadillo and **«The Destiny of Nathalie 'X'». It looks at the way Boyd approaches crucial events in twentieth-century history and how he unmasks the follies that underlay most of them. It also deals with issues such as the effects of British colonialism in Africa, the superficiality of Hollywood's film industry and the shortcomings of modern urban civilisation. The theoretical framework of this study is based on the analysis of recent satire criticism.

Autorentext

The Author: Juan F. Elices (1975) is a Lecturer at the Department of English Studies (UNED-Madrid) where he teaches 18th and 19th-Century English Literature and Postcolonial Literatures in English. He studied English Philology at the University of Alcalá (Madrid). In 1999 and 2000, he was Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Cambridge University, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. with honours in English Literature from the University of Alcalà in 2003. He was awarded the «Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado» for his doctoral thesis.

Inhalt
Contents: William Boyd's Narrative Production A Good Man in Africa as Political and Anti-Colonial Satire Anti-War Satire in An Ice-Cream War Stars and Bars: Great Britain and the United States at Boyd's Satiric Stake The Relationship between Satire and Cinema: «The Destiny of Nathalie 'X'» Conflicts of Identity: Armadillo's Satiric Approaches to City Life.