Download or read book The Rise of the African Novel written by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition
Download or read book Half of a Yellow Sun written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.
Download or read book Teaching the African Novel written by Gaurav Desai and published by Modern Language Association of America. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the African novel, and how should it be taught? The twenty-three essays of this volume address these two questions and in the process convey a wealth of information and ideas about the diverse regions, peoples, nations, languages, and writers of the African continent. Topics include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's favoring of indigenous languages and literary traditions over European; the special place of Marxism in African letters;the influence of Frantz Fanon; women writers and the sub-Saharan novel;the Maghrebian novel;the novel and the griot epic in the Sahel;Islam in the West African novel;novels in Spanish from Equatorial Guinea;apartheid and postapartheid fiction;African writers in the diaspora;globalization in East African fiction; teaching Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to students in different countries;the Onitsha market romance. The volume editor, Gaurav Desai, writes, "The point of the volume is to encourage a reading of Africa that is sensitive to its history of colonization but at the same time responsive to its present multiracial and multicultural condition."
Download or read book Purple Hibiscus written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating. As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together. Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
Download or read book The African written by Harold Courlander and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The African Novel in English written by M. Keith Booker and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The African Novel in English Keith Booker uses eight African novels to illustrate the scopes, varieties and the general aesthetic, cultural, and political concerns that have motivated African authors.
Download or read book The African Novel of Ideas written by Jeanne-Marie Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature. Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought. The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel written by F. Abiola Irele and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical status - an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebe - or can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures.
Download or read book Psychological Constructs and the Craft of African Fiction of Yesteryears written by Linus Tongwo Asong and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2012 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel remains the most popular genre in the African literary landscape. In the very large body of criticism that has been devoted to the craft of African fiction, this very stimulating study of six African novels will hold its own distinctive place for a long while. It brings to African critical thought not only an exceptional acumen of interpretation and analysis, but something much more important to most of the previous serious literary study than mere technical dissection - a keen sense of the experience and imaginative truth that make Asong's selected African texts living books as well as authentic record of human and moral values. Many of Asong's perceptions are not only critically shrewd but humanly searching, alert to aesthetic quality and invention. No one interested in creative criticism of African fiction will read this book without finding its approach a challenge to his or her own reading of African fiction, and a stimulus to understanding the growth and enduring richness of the best of the African novel. The book balances nicely in its choice of three texts in English and three in French, the two dominant colonial languages in Africa South of the Sahara. Even more interesting is the fact that although all the French texts have been translated into English, Asong opts to treat the three in the original language in which they were conceived and executed, a decision which keeps the reader as close as possible to the original idiom.
Download or read book African Literature in the Digital Age written by Shola Adenekan and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.
Download or read book No Longer at Ease written by Chinua Achebe and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1987 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obi Okenkwo, a Nigerian country boy, is determined to make it in the city. Educated in England, he has new, refined tastes which eventually conflict with his good resolutions and lead to his downfall.
Download or read book Afropolitanism and the Novel written by Ashleigh Harris and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordability for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African national literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about Afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today. This book extends this debate, arguing that Africa’s ‘de-realization’ in global representation and the global economy is reflected in the African novel becoming dominated by Afropolitan, rather than African, aesthetics, styles, and forms. Drawing on close readings of a variety of major African novels of the 2000s, the volume traces the tensions between the novel’s complicity with and resistance to such de-realization. The book argues that current trends and experiments in African non-realist genres, such as science fiction, magical and animist realism, Afro-futurism, and speculative environmentalism, are the result of a preoccupation with such de-realization. The volume is a significant exploration into literary form and its social, philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings. It will be a must-read for scholars, students, and researchers of African literature, politics, philosophy, and culture studies.
Download or read book Magical Realism in West African Fiction written by Brenda Cooper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka has been connected with nationalist agendas. This is a fascinating and important work for all those working on African literature, magical realism, or postcoloniality.
Download or read book African Literature written by Safoura Salami-Boukari and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2012 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we resolve the insider/outsider interpreting conundrum? Why do readers from different parts of the world read, interpret, or understand foreign literatures the way they do? What drives peculiar critical reactions, canon formations and such issues which determine the survival of cultural productions or their continued adoption as useful bolsters for a people's self-definition or indeed self-preservation and self-determination? African Literature: Gender Discourse, Religious Values, and the African Worldview offers a series of fresh insights into most of the old "problematics" which used to sustain the interpretations of African literature, especially by women. Students, scholars, and general readers wishing to consider issues of gender in relation to African cultural and socioeconomic systems and what Salami-Boukari interrogates and names as an "African worldview," will find the interdisciplinary discussion of historical analyses, literary criticism and gender discourses a useful method for engaging contemporary African perspectives.
Download or read book African Novels and the Question of Orality written by Eileen Julien and published by . This book was released on 1992-07-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This genre lends itself to sophisticated experimentation in political discourse. Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie (1979) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross (1982) caricature the puerile representatives of political and economic power through grotesque physical appetites and bodily deformations.
Download or read book Stories Fly written by Brenda Cooper and published by New Africa Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains an extraordinary collection of short stories and novel extracts written by Africans living outside Africa. It is a collection that also examines the little unknown area of an African experience of living abroad, with themes of identity, belonging and culture as well. Where is home? How does our identity change when we move to a new country, or when national borders are eroded by globalization? These are some of the themes explored in this collection of new fiction from African writers living outside the continent. The writers of the stories and novel extracts come from countries as diverse as Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania and the Sudan. They include both established writers, such as Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and many exciting new voices. By turns humorous, fantastic, satirical and moving, the fiction reveals new worlds to us. This book travels the globe with African writers.
