Download or read book Forest of A Thousand Daemons written by D.O. Fagunwa and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language.
Download or read book The Palm wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm wine Tapster in the Dead s Town written by Amos Tutuola and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic novel tells the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings - among them the complete gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners and the insatiable hungry-creature. Mixing Yoruba folktales with what T. S. Eliot described as a 'creepy crawly imagination', "The Palm-Wine Drinkard" is regarded as the seminal work of African literature.
Download or read book Pre Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Download or read book Daemons Are Forever written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the “outer dæmons” that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place at the heart of the discipline of the history of religions.
Download or read book What the forest told me written by Adeduntan, Ayo and published by NISC (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of Yoruba culture and performance tend to focus mainly on standardised forms of performance, and ignore the more prevalent performance culture which is central to everyday life. What the Forest Told Me conveys the elastic nature of African cultural expression through narratives of the Yoruba hunters' exploits. Hunters' narratives provide a window on the Yoruba understanding and explanation of their world; a cosmology that negates the anthropocentric view of creation. In a very literal sense, man, in this peculiar world, is an equal actor with animal and nature spirits with whom he constantly contests and negotiates space. Adeduntan offers new insights into key aspects of Yoruba culture, while providing a close appraisal of particular texts and contexts of oral performance forms. In doing so, he presents a fresh view of the poetics of oral performance, rising above generalisation and mere description.
Download or read book Yoruba Folktales written by Amos Tutuola and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author ranks as one of the foremost living traditional African storytellers - as recognised by the acclaim of his first book, The Palmvine Drinkard. This book includes seven folktales especially for young adults, but of universal appeal. Beautiful black and white ink drawings illustrate the tales whose cast of characters include humans, a goddess, an elephant woman, a boa constrictor and a shell-man.
Download or read book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts written by Amos Tutuola and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutuola's second novel, was first published in 1954. It tells the tale of a small boy who wanders into the heart of a fantastical African forest, the dwelling place of innumerable wild, grotesque and terrifying beings. He is captured by ghosts, buried alive and wrapped up in spider webs, but after several years he marries and accepts his new existence. With the appearance of the television-handed ghostess, however, comes a possible route of escape.'Tutuola ... has the immediate intuition of a creative artist working by spell and incantation.' V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman
Download or read book The Village Witch Doctor and Other Stories written by Amos Tutuola and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yoruba legend and culture were the source of much of Amos Tutuola's writing and the stories collected here are no exception. They feature characters from folklore, archetypal figures from Yoruba society, supernatural or magical happenings, acute human observation and often a moral point. Their very titles - from 'The Duckling Brothers and their Disobedient Sister' to 'Don't Pay Bad for Bad' - are evocative of a unique blend of tradition and imagination, which belongs to the same universal culture as Aesop and the Brothers Grimm.
Download or read book The Witches of Kyiv written by Orest Somov and published by Sova Books. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Witches of Kyiv and Other Gothic Tales by Orest Somov the supernatural is present throughout Ukraine, from a cemetery in Kyivan Rus, to an isolated forest cottage in the seventeenth century Kozak era, to the society ballrooms of Somov’s own world – the early nineteenth century. Gothic horror appears in many guises including witches, warlocks, demons and vengeful ‘rusalka’. Strange soothsayers and malevolent visitors represent the forces of good and evil. In her foreword Dr Svitlana Krys describes Somov “as an initiator of an indigenous literary tradition of the Gothic in the Ukrainian literary canon”. Native folk traditions, ghost stories and European Romanticism are twisted together in Somov’s imaginative tales, most of which are published here in English for the first time.
Download or read book Eniitan written by Aramide Segun and published by . This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eniitan, a bronze albino woman in her early twenties, lives with her elder sister, Abike, brother-in-law, Tunde, and their twins, Taiwo and Kehinde. The fragile peace of the home is shattered one morning when Eniitan wakes up to find her big sister has made changes to her birthday plans. This seemingly innocuous act sparks off a devastating chain of events that exposes a brutal past and threatens to tear the family apart.Eniitan's love-hate relationship with her sister is aggravated by the hostility of her brother-in-law who believes that she is a re-incarnation of her dead grandmother - Iya. Her uncanny resemblance to the late departed, reputed to be a powerful herbalist in her time, makes him fear her. He wants her out of the house and out of their lives. Eniitan herself is haunted by the spectre of her grandmother and cannot seem to escape the terrifying images of death which constantly appear to her. One night she vanishes without a trace in mysterious circumstances and all fingers point to her brother-in-law's involvement but, is he responsible?Her disappearance throws the family into turmoil until the truth is uncovered. This story of a dysfunctional Nigerian family reveals the complexities of life in a society where social prejudices, superstition, religion, politics, and love make or break the human spirit.
Download or read book Of Africa written by Wole Soyinka and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed the promise of independence and lived through postcolonial failure. He deeply comprehends the pressing problems of Africa, and, an irrepressible essayist and a staunch critic of the oppressive boot, he unhesitatingly speaks out.In this magnificent new work, Soyinka offers a wide-ranging inquiry into Africa's culture, religion, history, imagination, and identity. He seeks to understand how the continent's history is entwined with the histories of others, while exploring Africa's truest assets: "its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment—both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual)."Fully grasping the extent of Africa's most challenging issues, Soyinka nevertheless refuses defeatism. With eloquence he analyzes problems ranging from the meaning of the past to the threat of theocracy. He asks hard questions about racial attitudes, inter-ethnic and religious violence, the viability of nations whose boundaries were laid out by outsiders, African identity on the continent and among displaced Africans, and more. Soyinka's exploration of Africa relocates the continent in the reader's imagination and maps a course toward an African future of peace and affirmation.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book The Forest of a Thousand Daemons written by D. O. Fagunwa and published by Walton-on-Thames, Surrey : Nelson. This book was released on 1968 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book Sarah s Psalm written by Florence Ladd and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-08-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the background of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of Afrocentrism in the late 1960s, Florence Ladd tells the story of a young African-American woman's search for her love and identity--a journey that takes her from Massachusetts to Senegal, and from a stifling marriage to a life filled with the riches of a new culture, marriage, and motherhood.
Download or read book In the Forest of Olodumare written by D. O. Fagunwa and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to African Literatures written by Olakunle George and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.
