Download or read book Xhosa Poets and Poetry written by Jeff Opland and published by New Africa Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xhosa oral poetry has defied the threats to its integrity over two centuries, to take its place in a free South Africa. This volume establishes the background to this poetic re-emergence, preserving and transmitting the voice of the Xhosa poet.
Download or read book Xhosa Oral Poetry written by Jeff Opland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-12-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1983, was the first detailed study of the Xhosa oral poetry tradition.
Download or read book Oral Poetry written by Ruth Finnegan and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic study is an introduction to “oral poetry,” a broad subject which Ruth Finnegan interprets as ranging from American folksongs, Eskimo lyrics, and modern popular songs to medieval oral literature, the heroic poems of Homer, and recent epic compositions in Asia or the Pacific. The book employs a broad comparative perspective and considers oral poetry from Africa, Asia, and Oceania as well as Europe and America. The results of Finnegan’s vast research illuminate and suggest fresh conclusions to many current controversies: the nature of oral tradition and oral composition; the notion of a special oral style; possible connection between types of poetry and types of society; the differences between oral and written communication; and the role of poets in non-literate societies. Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary scholarship, Oral Poetry attempts to create a greater appreciation of the literary aspects of this fascinating form of poetry. Finnegan quotes extensively from a wide variety of sources, mainly in translation. The discussion is presented in non-technical language and will be of interest not only to sociologists and social anthropologists, but also to all those interested in comparative literature and in folk poetry from cultures around the world. The re-issue of this text, widely used in folklore, anthropology, and comparative literature courses, comes at an appropriate juncture in interdisciplinary scholarship, which is witnessing the breakdown of traditional disciplinary boundaries and an increase in the comparative study of oral poetry. For this volume Ruth Finnegan has provided a new foreword relating the text to more recent developments.
Download or read book Oral Literature in Africa written by Ruth Finnegan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Eternal Storyteller written by Vibeke Boerdahl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese storytelling has survived through more than a millennium into our own time, while similar oral arts have fallen into oblivion in the West. Under the main heading of 'The Eternal Storyteller', in August 1996 the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies hosted an International Workshop on Oral Literature in Modern China. To this meeting, the first of its kind in Europe, five special guests were invited - master tellers from Yangzhou: Wang Xizotang, Li Xintang, Fei Zhengliang, Dai Buzhang and Hui Zhaolong. The volume derived from this meeting includes an introductory article written by John Miles Foley entitled 'A Comparative View on Oral Traditions'. Thereafter, a wide range of topics relating to Chinese oral literature is covered under the headings: 'Historical Lines', 'A Spectrium of Genres', 'Studies of Yangzhou and Suzhou Story- telling' and 'Performances of Yangzhou Storytelling'. However, the present volume does more than include papers derived from the meeting. It is also lavishly illustrated in word and picture from performances by the guest-storytellers. In so doing, the world of Chinese story telling is not just described and analysed - it is also brought to life.
Download or read book Stranger at Home written by Ashlee Neser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the poetry, vision and deeply inhospitable context of one of South Africas most talented praise poets. The praise poet (imbongi) is a familiar cultural icon in contemporary South Africa. Public events as diverse as presidential inaugurations, openings of parliament, fashion shows and boxing contests begin with the rousing declamations of charismatic iimbongi. Yet until the institution of majority-rule, praise poets who sought to shock their audiences with dangerous truths could claim none of the prestige enjoyed by their present-day counterparts. Under apartheid, many praise poets either ceased to perform or abandoned the imbongi's duty to diagnose and criticize political and social ills. There was, however, one brilliant Xhosa imbongi called David Manisi, a poet widely acclaimed in his youth as the successor to the great SEK Mqhayi, who refused to capitulate to the ease of silence or complicity. As documented by Jeff Opland in The Dassie and the Hunter (UKZN Press), Manisi worked tirelessly and in embattled contexts to address his audiences with demands, criticisms and aspirations they frequently misunderstood. The author of five volumes of Xhosa poetry and performer of inspired and elegantly crafted izibongo (praise poems), Manisi saw himself as a man of multiple places, allegiances and identities at a time when these markers of self were rigidly policed. Manisi's entrance on the local Transkeian poetry scene was legendary. He was for a time the most famous poet in Kaiser Mathanzima's court. He also wrote the first published poem about Nelson Mandela in 1954, hailing him prophetically as 'Gleaming Road'. Despite these early accomplishments, Manisi ended his career as a lonely performer in American and South African universities. He never met Mandela, his hero of old. Ashlee Neser examines Manisi as an inventive negotiator of rural and urban spaces, modernity and tradition, performance and publication, the local and the foreign.
Download or read book Epic Traditions of Africa written by Stephen Belcher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-22 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Belcher's volume contains a much needed and extremely well-integrated overview and discussion of a vast inter-related West African culture complex that deserves and requires the kind of original, insightful treatment it receives here." —David Conrad Epic Traditions of Africa crosses boundaries of language, distance, and time to gather material from diverse African oral epic traditions. Stephen Belcher explores the rich past and poetic force of African epics and places them in historical and social, as well as artistic contexts. Colorful narratives from Central and West African traditions are illuminated along with texts that are more widely available to Western readers—the Mande Sunjata and the Bamana Segou. Belcher also takes up questions about European influences on African epic poetry and the possibility of mutual influence through out the genre. This lively and informative volume will inspire an appreciation for the distinctive qualities of this uniquely African form of verbal art.
Download or read book Xhosa written by Patricia Schonstein and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rabadia Ratshatsha written by Mawatle Jeremiah Mojalefa and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After forty years in academia, P.S. Groenwald leaves a rich heritage, which is measured not only in terms of his impressive list of publications, but also in terms of those for whom he was the academic mentor. His versatility as academic is reflected in the variety of specialist fields in which his former students find themselves. Experts in literature and linguistics, lexicographers and translators all found their niches under his tutelage. In appreciation of the enormous contribution that he made towards their careers and academic schooling, former students and colleagues have decided to honour him with this festschrift.
Download or read book The Influence of the Traditional Praise poem on Modern Bantu Poetry written by Samuel Doggie Ngcongwane and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Epic Singers and Oral Tradition written by Albert Bates Lord and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic. The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature written by Abiola Irele and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 906 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring new perspectives on African and Caribbean literature, this History explores the scope of the literature (variety of languages, regions and genres); nature of composition; and complex relationship with African social and geo-political history. It comprehensively covers the field of African literature, defined by creative expression in Africa as well as the black diaspora. This major history of African literature will be an essential resource for specialists and students.
Download or read book The Tongue Is Fire written by Harold Scheub and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-10-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.
Download or read book The Literatures of the U S Mexican War written by Jaime Javier Rodríguez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literary archive of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848) opens to view the conflicts and relationships across one of the most contested borders in the Americas. Most studies of this literature focus on the war's nineteenth-century moment of national expansion. In The Literatures of the U.S.-Mexican War, Jaime Javier Rodríguez brings the discussion forward to our own moment by charting a new path into the legacies of a military conflict embedded in the cultural cores of both nations. Rodríguez's groundbreaking study moves beyond the terms of Manifest Destiny to ask a fundamental question: How do the war's literary expressions shape contemporary tensions and exchanges among Anglo Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans. By probing the war's traumas, anxieties, and consequences with a fresh attention to narrative, Rodríguez shows us the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican War to our own era of demographic and cultural change. Reading across dime novels, frontline battle accounts, Mexican American writings and a wide range of other popular discourse about the war, Rodríguez reveals how historical awareness itself lies at the center of contemporary cultural fears of a Mexican "invasion," and how the displacements caused by the war set key terms for the ways Mexican Americans in subsequent generations would come to understand their own identities. Further, this is also the first major comparative study that analyzes key Mexican war texts and their impact on Mexico's national identity.
Download or read book The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics written by Roland Greene and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-26 with total page 1678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.
Download or read book Language Learning Power Race and Identity written by Liz Johanson Botha and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2015 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the strategies and identities of colonials who have learned the languages of colonised people. Using the stories of white South Africans who acquired isiXhosa during the apartheid years, this book offers insights into relationships between language, power, race, identity and change.
Download or read book Of Land Bones and Money written by Emily McGiffin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to segregation, apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa. Emily McGiffin first discusses the history of the amaXhosa people and the environment of their homelands before moving on to the arrival of the British, who began a relentless campaign annexing land and resources in the region. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and postcolonial ecocriticism, she considers isiXhosa poetry in translation within its cultural, historical, and environmental contexts, investigating how these poems struggle with the arrival and expansion of the exploitation of natural resources in South Africa and the entrenchment of profoundly racist politics that the process entailed. In contemporary South Africa, iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity. Their ongoing practice of producing complex, spiritually rich literature continues to have a profound social effect, contributing directly to the healing and well-being of their audiences, to political transformation, and to environmental justice.
