Literary Criticism : African

Illuminating J.M. Coetzee's preoccupation, from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year, with the paradox of postcolonial authorship centering on the authority authorship engenders, Jane Poyner examines Coetzee's line of author-narrators to trace how he rehearses and revises his understanding of intellectual practice at a time of seismic change in South Africa. Her theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to postcolonial studies. more...

Price: $99.95

1. The African Imagination. 2. Orality, Literacy, and African Literature. 3. African Letters: The Making of a Tradition. 4. Dimensions of African Discourse. 5. A Study in Ambiguity: Amadou Hampate Ba's The Fortunes of Wangrin. 6. Narrative, History and the African Imagination: Amadou Kourouma's Monne, outrages et defis. 7. The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. 8. The Return of the Native: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Masks. 9. A National Voice: The Poetry and Plays of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. 10. Parables of the African Condition: The New Realism in African Fiction. Notes. Bibliography. Index more...

Price: $49.95

This book marks an important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies in its clarification of a certain Africanist discourse and its far-reaching analyses of a literature of animism. more...

Price: $34.00

Apartheid and Beyond is a major contribution to the study of South African literary culture. It offers elegant readings of Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, Dike, Magona, and Mda, focusing on the intimate relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form revealed in their work. It also explores the way apartheid functioned in its day-to-day operations as a geographical system of control, exerting its power through such spatial mechanisms as residential segregation, bantustans, passes, and prisons. Though in the first instance concerned with literary texts, Apartheid and Beyond also meditates on crucial historical processes like colonial occupation, the creation of black townships, migration, forced removals, the emergence of informal settlements, the gradual integration of white cities, and efforts at land reform. Cumulatively, the six essays in this book tell the story of the transformation of apartheid's landscapes of oppression into the more ambiguous landscapes of contemporary South Africa: landscapes of tourism and leisure, of crime and privatized security, of uncontrolled urbanization and persistent poverty. Barnard's methodologically eclectic writing draws on the work of major European and U.S. theorists like Foucault, De Certeau, and Jameson, as well as important African intellectuals like Mbembe, Ramphele, and Ndebele. It also takes literary figures seriously as theorists of space in their own right. Apartheid and Beyond is both an innovative account of an important body of politically-inflected literature and an imaginative reflection on the socio-spatial aspects of the transition from apartheid to democracy. more...

Price: $24.23

This book offers an in-depth study of the autobiographical writings of four twentieth-century writers from North Africa, Assia Djebar, Mouloud Feraoun, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Albert Memmi, as they explore issues of language, identity and the individual’s relationship to history. The book places these writers in a clearly defined theoretical context, introducing and contextualising each of the four through the application of postcolonial studies and literary theory on autobiography linked to close textual reading of their works. Avoiding both psychoanalytical theory and approaches concerned primarily with the writer’s ‘testimony value’, Kelly concentrates instead on the poetic and literary qualities of each author’s work, dwelling on the politics and poetics of identity, as well as the ethics and aesthetics of this literature. She includes clear discussions of key terms such as ‘postcolonial’, ‘Francophone’, and ‘autobiography’, which current academic discourse has rendered very complex and even opaque. The book includes a fascinating photograph of two stone tablets inscribed with Punic and Numidian scripts, now held in the British Museum, which Assia Djebar writes about at length in one of the texts studied in the book. more...

Price: $85.00