African Literature An Anthology of Criticism and Theory

by Olaniyan, Tejumola; Quayson, Ato

• ISBN13: 9781405112017
• ISBN10: 1405112018
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This is the first anthology to bring together the key texts of African literary theory and criticism. Brings together key texts that are otherwise hard to locate Covers all genres and critical schools Provides the intellectual context for understanding African literature Facilitates the future development of African literary criticism

Author Biography

Tejumola Olaniyan is Professor in English at the University of Wisconsin. His publications include: Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (1995), Arrest the Music: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (2004), and he is coeditor of African Drama and Performance (2004).

Ato Quayson is Professor in English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, University of Toronto. His previous publications include Strategic Transformation in Nigerian Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (2000), Relocating Postcolonialism (Blackwell, 2002) and Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Backgrounds

Africa and Writing

Sub-Saharan Africa's Literary History in a Nutshell

Politics, Culture, and Literary Form

African Literature in Portuguese

North African Writing

A Continent and its Literatures in French

African Literature and the Colonial Factor

African Literature: Myth or Reality?

Orality, Literacy, and the Interface

Africa and Orality

Orality, Literacy, and African Literature

Oral Literature and Modern African Literature

Women's Oral Genres

The Oral Artist's Script

Writer, Writing, and Function

The Novelist as Teacher

The Truth of Fiction

Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics

Nobel Lecture

Redefining Relevance

Preparing Ourselves for Freedom

Creativity in/and Adversarial Contexts

A Voice That Would Not Be Silenced

Exile and Creativity: A Prolonged Writer's Block

Containing Cockroaches (Memories of Incarceration Reconstructed in Exile)

Writing Against Neo-Colonialism

The Writer and Responsibility

Dissidence and Creativity

Culture Beyond Color? A South African Dilemma

In Praise of Exile

The African Writer's Experience of European Literature

On Nativism and the Quest for Indigenous Aesthetics: Negritude and Traditionalism

Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century

What is N_gritude?

Negritude and a New Africa: An Update

Prodigals, Come Home!

Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition

My Signifier is More Native than Yours: Issues in Making a Literature African: Ad_l_k+ Ad_+ko

Out of Africa: Topologies of Nativism

On National Culture

True and False Pluralism

"An Open Letter to Africans" c/o The Punic One-Party State

Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism

The Language of African Literature

The Dead End of African Literature

The Language of African Literature

Anamnesis in the Language of Writing

African-Language Literature: Tragedy and Hope

On Genres

Background to the West African Novel

Languages of the Novel: A Lover's Reflections

Realism and Naturalism in African Fiction

"Who Am I?": Fact and Fiction in African First-Person Narrative

Festivals, Ritual, and Drama in Africa

The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy

Introduction to King Oedipus

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