Download or read book African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Almost everyone in 20th-century literary studies will find this book valuable, as will most people interested in literary theory. It will be of particular interest to students of African and (more generally) Third World and postcolonial literature, to feminists of all stripes, and to those who are interested in philosophical approaches to literature. I would buy this book and consult it regularly."-- Satya P. Mohanty, Cornell University Challenging most Western approaches to the interpretation of African texts, cultures, and histories, Donald Wehrs offers detailed readings of six novels to suggest that the feminism of the heroines, the logic of the plots, and even the very language of the narrators in these fictions rest upon conceptual and moral vocabularies drawn from indigenous African sources. Wehrs argues that these novelists, and the Islamic and indigenous African discourses they draw upon, conceive of the ethical in terms closer to those of the European Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas than to any of the moral theorizing--from Hobbes to Derrida and Foucault--characteristic of the modern West. He maintains that two of the authors he examines attempt to articulate a version of feminism that is consistent with principles of Islamic piety. Indeed, he continues, the feminism of all six novels ultimately rests upon an understanding of ethics that is radically at odds with the mainstream of contemporary literary theory. He proposes a reading that gives indigenous African writers a voice to "answer back" to the modern West without recourse to either nativism or abstraction, an approach to and an appreciation of African feminist fiction that overcomes major impasses in postcolonial theory. Beyond that, this book casts new light upon related issues of interest in women's studies, feminist theory, theories of the novel, cultural studies, and ethical philosophy. Donald R. Wehrs, associate professor of English at Auburn University, has written on African fiction in Modern Language Notes and on Levinas and literature in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
Download or read book The International Journal of African Historical Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender written by Sadia Zulfiqar and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism, but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this book is three-fold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are “national allegories” and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.
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 ALA Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne written by Thomas Keymer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides essays on the author of Tristram Shandy, his eighteenth-century context, his oeuvre and its reception.
Download or read book The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950 written by Simon Gikandi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 examines the institutional and social peculiarities that make fiction produced in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950 important to the history of the novel in English.
Download or read book Literature and the Writer written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and the Writer was first conceived with the hope the essays would shed light on several dimensions of the authorial craft. It was the hope of the editor that the selected essays would examine not only writers’ choice of vocabulary, but also their deliberate selection of grammatical constructions and word order and their seamless weaving together of plots and imagery. Moreover, the analyses would also draw attention to how the writing process impacts the development of characters and the formulation of thematic strands in fiction. Thus, a wide variety of authors are deliberately selected to give the text depth: writers of popular fiction as well as modern classics are included, and contrasts are established between traditional writers and those who prefer to follow experimental trends. Modernists are set against postmodernists, absurdists vs. realists, minority ethnicities vs. majority cultures, and dominant genders appear in contrast to subordinated ones. Clearly, the major tenet of the collection is that the writing profession provides an unending dilemma that deserves to be explored in more detail as readers try to determine how authorial voices confuse while simultaneously elucidating their audience, how texts are constructed by authors and yet deconstructed by the very words they choose to include, how silence functions as inaudible yet audible discourse; and how authorial self-concept shapes not only itself but is also echoed in the fictional characters / writers who appear in the texts.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of the Novel written by Peter Melville Logan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in a single volume paperback, this advanced reference resource for the novel and novel theory offers authoritative accounts of the history, terminology, and genre of the novel, in over 140 articles of 500-7,000 words. Entries explore the history and tradition of the novel in different areas of the world; formal elements of the novel (story, plot, character, narrator); technical aspects of the genre (such as realism, narrative structure and style); subgenres, including the bildungsroman and the graphic novel; theoretical problems, such as definitions of the novel; book history; and the novel's relationship to other arts and disciplines. The Encyclopedia is arranged in A-Z format and features entries from an international cast of over 140 scholars, overseen by an advisory board of 37 leading specialists in the field, making this the most authoritative reference resource available on the novel. This essential reference, now available in an easy-to-use, fully indexed single volume paperback, will be a vital addition to the libraries of literature students and scholars everywhere.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub Saharan Africa written by Kathleen Sheldon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African women’s history is a vast topic that embraces a wide variety of societies in over 50 countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. Africa is a predominantly agricultural continent, and a major factor in African agriculture is the central role of women as farmers. It is estimated that between 65 and 80 percent of African women are engaged in cultivating food for their families, and in the past that percentage was likely even higher. Thus, one common thread across much of the continent is women’s daily work in their family plot. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on individual African women in history, politics, religion, and the arts; on important events, organizations, and publications; and on topics important to women in general (marriage, fertility, employment) and to African women in particular (market women, child marriage, queen mothers). This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Women in Africa.
Download or read book In Proximity written by Melvyn New and published by Texas Tech University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.
Download or read book Juju Fission written by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, especially leaders, holding tête-à-têtes with men to address political impasses have been recognized as shrewd, double headed, or witchlike distinctions that link them with juju or extraordinary, survivalist powers. Juju Fission: Women's Alternative Fictions from the Sahara, the Kalahari, and the Oases In-Between is a theoretical and analytical book on African women writers that focuses on seven representative novels from different parts of Africa: Bessie Head's Maru (South Africa/Botswana); Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (Egypt); Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy; or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint and Changes (Ghana); Assia Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade (Algeria); Calixthe Beyala's The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me (Cameroon); and Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (Zimbabwe). In her analysis, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi demonstrates how women are viewed and how they operate in critical times. Ogunyemi explains how the heritage is passed on, in spite of dire situations emanating from colonialism, postcolonialism, ethnicism, sexism, and grinding poverty. An important contribution to many fields, Juju Fission is excellent background material for courses on African studies, women's studies, African Diaspora studies, black studies, global studies, and general literature studies.
Download or read book Cognition Literature and History written by Mark J. Bruhn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.
Download or read book Hospitalities written by Merle A. Williams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of imaginative essays traces notions of hospitality across a sequence of theoretical permutations, not only as an urgent challenge for our conflicted present, but also as foundational for ethics and resonant within the play of language. The plural form of the title highlights the inter-implication of hospitality with its exclusive others, holding suspicious rejection in tension with the receptiveness that transforms socio-cultural relations. Geographically, the collection traverses the globe from Australia and Africa to Britain, Europe and the United States, weaving exchanges from south to north, as well as south to south, and thoughtfully remapping our world. Temporally, the chapters range from the primordial hospitality offered by the earth, through the Middle Ages, to contemporary detention centres and the crisis of homelessness. Thematically, hospitality embraces sites of dwelling and the land, humans and animals in their complex embodiment, spectres and the dead, dolls and art objects.This text openly welcomes the reader to participate in shaping fresh critical discourses of the hospitable, whether in literary and linguistic studies, art and architecture, philosophy or politics.
Download or read book Cultures of Populism written by Merle A. Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid global spread of populism has become an arresting and often disturbing phenomenon in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays explores the complex histories and diverse geographies of populist activity, examining its manifestations on both the political left and the right while tracing its dangerous association with nativism, racism and xenophobia. Established socio-political theories are questioned and challenged, giving way to fresh philosophical or cultural perspectives. At the heart of this collection lies a concern with the capacity of the humanities – and especially literary studies – to interpret, evaluate and intervene in this populist moment. Literary discussion ranges from Henry James and William Faulkner to Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Ali Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. These essays demonstrate the pertinence and value of enquiries from multiple perspectives if we are to come to terms with the impact of populist rhetoric on meaning and truth, as proliferating misinformation unmoors conceptual and ethical coherence. The chapters in this book were originally published in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and English Studies in Africa.
Download or read book The Female Condition in the Novels of Gabonese Writer Sylvie Ntsame written by Paschal Kyiiripuo Kyoore and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Gabonese writer Sylvie Ntsame utilizes her novels to question certain patriarchal traditions and practices in African society (such as polygyny) that, in certain contexts, tend to silence the voice of the female. Through engaging with feminist theories, among other theoretical frameworks, the author demonstrates how, in some of Ntsame’s novels, the black female body is an object of voyeurism that reduces the women to eroticized, exoticized Others. The author further argues that Ntsame counters the dystopia of racism with a depiction of idealized love through an interracial relationship, presented against the backdrop of stereotypes and myths that stifle such relationships. Ntsame does this by going back to her cultural roots, and calling for understanding between peoples of diverse ethnicities and cultures. The book makes valuable contributions to the study of Gabonese women’s writing in particular, and African women’s writing in general.
Download or read book Levinas and Nineteenth century Literature written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature presents nine essays that reread major British, American, and European nineteenth-century literary texts in light of the post-deconstruction ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The first section pursues in essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Baudelaire connections between Levinas's radical rethinking of subjectivity and Romantic generic, aesthetic, and conceptual innovation. The second section explores how Levinas's analysis of totalizing thought may illuminate how Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Douglass, Susan Warner, and Melville grapple with American experience and culture. The third section considers the relevance of Levinas's work for reassessments of the realist novel through essays on Austen, Dickens, and George Eliot. Essay authors are A.C. Goodson, David P. Haney, E.S. Burt, Alain Paul Toumayan, N.S. Boone, Lorna Wood, Donald R. Wehrs, Melvyn New, and Rachel Hollander. Donald R. Wehrs is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University. David P. Haney is Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Professor of English at Appalachian State University.
