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By "unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest" (New York Times), Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage is a fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multi-culturalism. This volume brings together nineteen iconoclastic essays from the past twenty-five years on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics - many of which are published here for the first time. Whether he is discoursing on the idea of "negritude" in "From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image" or on protest literature in "The Writer in a Modern African State"; debunking the orthodoxies of contemporary literary criticism in "The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies"; offering surprising readings of Shakespeare and Aristophanes; expounding on the tragedy of "the recurrent cycle of human stupidity"; skewering intellectual demigods or his own critics, Soyinka is never less than profound and incisive. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gives a startling vision of culture in our times.