King Allan Quatermain Analysis

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Biographical elements.

Born in 1856, Henry Rider Haggard remained all his life one of the servants of British power. He is active in the British imperial policy in South Africa, where he was successively Secretary Henry Bulwe, governor of Natal (1874-1875), involved in the mission of annexation of the Transvaal (1877), then Clerk Pretoria High Court. Hardly had he time to go to England to marry (1879), he returned to Natal until the Zulu and Boer rebellion forced him to join the metropolis.
Then he will start to write, first test on Africa (Cetywayo and his White Neighbours, 1882), and then quickly, a first novel that will ensure him success immediately, King Solomon's Mines (1885 ), which will be followed by many others.
Besides fiction and …show more content…

It opens with King Solomon's Mines (1885) soon followed by Allan Quatermain (1887), which ends with the death of the hero. Other adventures yet to follow, which will be located chronologically before the text: a new short "A Tale of the Three Lions" (1887), followed by thirteen books, including summers were translated into French Allan's Wife (1889, The Allan's wife), The Holy flower (1915, The sacred flower), The Ivory Child (1915), Allan and the Ice-Gods (1927, Ice Gods, which is an adaptation of a translation) and She and Allan (1921, She and Allan Quatermain) which enshrines the encounter of the first round and …show more content…

Indeed, there is some science of escapist literature in Rider Haggard, but also a taste for this kind of stories: in "About Fiction", he wrote "A weary public Continually calls for books, new books to make 'em forget, to refresh em, to occupy jaded minds with [...] toil and vexation and emptiness "(" a public exhausted wants books, new books to allow him to forget, to regenerate, to occupy éreintées souls by [...] work, invalidity and harassment "). We see, Haggard claims to a fiction that appeals more to the senses than to reason, which is more in the gap in compliance with the real, to the extraordinary rather than prosaic, because refuse the everyday world. Starting from a radical vision of romance (romance), no wonder it lead to a type of narrative itself

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