This collection of essays introduces students of African literature to the heritage of the African prose narrative, starting from its oral base and covering its linguistic and cultural diversity. The book brings together essays on both the classics and the relatively new works in all subgenres of the African prose narrative, including the traditional epic, the novel, the short story and the autobiography. The chapters are arranged according to the respective thematic paradigms under which the discussed works fall.

African literature, like the continent itself is enormous and diverse. East Africa's literature is different from West Africa's which is quite different from South Africa's which has different influences on it than North Africa's. Africa's literature is based on a widespread heritage of oral literature, some of which has now been recorded. Arabic influence can be detected as well as European, especially French and English. Legends, myths, proverbs, riddles and folktales form the mother load of the oral literature. This book presents an overview of African literature as well as a comprehensive bibliography, primarily of English language sources. Accessed by subject, author and title indexes.

This is a timely and comprehensive study combining various critical approaches to the fiction of Buchi Emecheta, one of Africa's most illustrious and contentious women writers. Feminist (Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva) and postcolonial approaches (writing back) are taken to Emecheta's texts to illuminate the personal, political and aesthetic ramifications of the production of this “born writer.” Poststructural programmes of analysis are shown to be less relevant to this writer’s fiction than Marxist and Bakhtinian perspectives. Emecheta is shown to be a bridge-builder between two cultures and two worlds in narratives (both challenging and popular) characterized by ambiguity, ambivalence and double-voiced discourse, all of which evince the writer's determination to expose imaginatively the colonial heritage of centre-periphery conflicts, cultural corruption, ethnic discrimination, gender oppression, and the migrant experience in multiracial communities.

In this collection of essays written from different critical perspectives, African playwrights demonstrate through their art that they are not only witnesses, but also consciences, of their societies.

The State of Stylistics contains a broad collection of papers that investigate how stylistics has evolved throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In so doing, it considers how stylisticians currently perceive their own respective fields of enquiry. It also defines what stylistics is, and how we might use it in research and teaching.

Concentrating on issues of power and change, this analysis of texts by Chinua Achbe, Bessie Head and Dambudzi Marechera teases out each author's view of how colonialism affected Africa, the contributions of Africans to their malaise, and how many reacted in creative, progressive, pragmatic ways.

This 1976 book provides both a historical survey and a critical analysis of the literature in French from West and Equatorial Africa. Professor Blair begins by discussing the social, educational and political influences which led to the formation of the Negritude movement and to a flowering of French-African creative writing. This historical approach is then complemented by a study of the different literary genres. She traces the evolution of the first manifestations of literary activity in French by African writers, the written folk-tale, fable and short story, from the oral tradition of the indigenous culture, and the eventual appearance of the novel with a legendary or historical theme. The origins of French-African drama are considered for the first time, and the work of the minor poets analysed. Finally, Professor Blair attempts a definition of the French-African novel, and studies examples from three major periods from the 1930s onwards.

The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

This is a commemorative volume devoted to the late Professor Willfried F. Feuser, a literary icon and a comparatist of no mean repute. Though German by origin, Professor Feuser showed great concern to the Africanist agenda of self-realisation, and therefore devoted the greatest part of his productive academic life to the cultural revival and socio-economic emancipation of Africa and the Diaspora through his scholarly publications. This book contains 20 essays on a wide range of issues in literary criticism.