Author: Ruth Finnegan
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924708
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 614
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Book Description
Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.
Author: Douglas Killam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313058210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
As more works of African Literature are being incorporated into the Language Arts and Cultural Studies curriculum, it becomes increasingly important to offer students and educators a meaningful context in which to explore these works. As part of Greenwood's Literature as Windows to World Culture series, this volume introduces readers to the cultural concerns of 10 of Africa's most reknowned writers. Written in clear accessible language, close analysis is given for 14 novels, including Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Paton's Cry the Beloved Country, chosen because of their literary importance and the frequency with which they are assigned. The ten analysis chapters each begin with a brief account of the authors' lives and their writing careers, noting especially the experiences and influences which have shaped their writing. Following this section is a major essay on their most prominent and best known work. Discussion of the historical and cultural issues in the novels is integrated into the literary commentary. Students will gain not a deeper appreciation for the fiction, but a more solid understanding of the core historical issues and cultural concerns that influence and shape the writing. The Introduction outlines the general history and development of Sub-Saharan African Literature. The colonial experiences and postcolonial struggles, the principal subject matter of African writers, differs from region to region. The geographic organization of this guide into West, East and South Africa reflects these different perspectives. Each section ends with a list of critical works that will assist readers and researchers further their understanding of the authors and their works. Short biographical sketches on 80 authors are also provided to expand readers' contact with African literature. The index assists users in identifying not only title and authors but also major themes and topics that the writings reveal.
Author: Gareth Cornwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231130465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134582234
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 886
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Book Description
The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book contains over 600 entries that cover criticism and theory, its development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers.
Author: Shola Adenekan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847012388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373541
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 562
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Book Description
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0385474547
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205368X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition
Author: Dominic Thomas
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253109545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
What characterizes the relationship between literature and the state? Should literature serve the needs of the state by constructing national consciousness, espousing state propaganda, and molding good citizens? Or should it be dedicated to a different kind of creative social endeavor? In this important book about literature and the politics of nation-building, Dominic Thomas assesses the contributions of Francophone African writers whose works have played a key role in the recent transition to democracy in the Congo. Exploring the works of Sony Labou Tansi, Henri Lopes, and Emmanuel Dongala, among others, Thomas highlights writers intimately involved with government and politics -- whether in support of the state's vision or with the intention of articulating a more open view of citizens and society. Focusing on themes such as collaboration, reconciliation, identity, history, and memory, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa elaborates a broader understanding of the circumstances of African colonization, modern African nation-state formation, and the complex cultural dynamics at work in Africa since independence.
Author: Abiola Irele
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195086195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat B , and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.
