Critical Survey Of World Literature Africa

A unique combination of biography and critical analysis, covering major writers from outside the United States and their significant works in fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction. A companion to the award-winning Critical Survey of American Literature, this comprehensive, six-volume set profiles major authors of fiction, drama, poetry, and essays, each with sections on biography, general analysis, and analysis of the author's most important works--novels, short stories, poems, and works of nonfiction. The completely updated edition covers 400 writers at the heart of literary studies, and now, volumes will be arranged by world region. This edition includes new coverage of contemporary authors from around the globe. Among the new authors profiled in this set are such well-known authors as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Reinaldo Arenas, J.G. Ballard, Alberto Fuguet, Marlon James, Yann Martel, Patrick Modiano, Orhan Pamuk, Will Self and Jorge Volpi. The literary scope of this reference work is remarkable. Plus, many original essays have been revised. The Biography, Analysis, and Summary sections are updated to include recent developments, and essays have newly updated bibliographies to provide readers with the latest information on the author's works and sources for further consultation. All essays include Discussion Topics, provocative questions that will prompt classroom debates on the writer's body of work, specific works, or life as it relates to his or her literature. Aimed at students, teachers, and members of reading groups, they can be used as paper topics or conversation points. In addition, phonetic pronunciation is provided for an author's foreign-language or unusual last name, and a Pronunciation Key appears at the beginning of all six volumes. Five helpful features can be found at the end of each volume: a Glossary; a Category List that groups authors by genre, country, gender, and ethnic identity; an Author Index that lists all authors covered in the set along with their works; a Title Index of all works covered in the set; and a Geographical List which groups the authors by country.

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

Disney's animated trailblazing, Dostoyevsky's philosophical neuroses, Hendrix's electric haze, Hitchcock's masterful manipulation, Frida Kahlo's scarifying portraits, Van Gogh's vigorous color, and Virginia Woolf's modern feminism: this multicultural reference tool examines 200 artists, writers, and musicians from around the world. Detailed biographical essays place them in a broad historical context, showing how their luminous achievements influenced and guided contemporary and future generations, shaped the internal and external perceptions of their craft, and met the sensibilities of their audience.

Although African literatures in English and French are widely known outside Africa, those in the African languages themselves have not received comparable attention. In this book a number have been selected for survey by fourteen specialist writers, providing the reader with an introduction to this very wide field and a body of reference material which includes extensive bibliographies and biographical information on African authors. Theoretical issues such as genre divisions are discussed in the essays and the historical, social and political forces at work in the creation and reception of African literature are examined. Literature is treated as an art whose medium is language, so that both the oral and written forms are encompassed. This book will be of value not only to readers concerned with the cultures of Africa but to all those with an interest in the literary phenomena of the world in general.

From a forest of controversies and opinions by African and non-African critics and writers, Bishop has been able to elicit strong paradigms of critical and theoretical evaluation of African literature by Africans themselves, and therein lies the abiding merit of this book. Modern Fiction Studies The years immediately following World War II saw an extraordinary literary development in Black sub-Saharan Africa--the emergence of a virtually new literature. This phenomenon became the center of critical controversy as writers, commentators, and scholars attempted to forge a set of aesthetic standards for this new literature. Although the European contribution to this discussion is will known, the views of African critics, who have been writing voluminously on the subject since the 1940s, have been given far less attention. In this study, Bishop provides the first systematic examination of how Africans themselves have evaluated African literature in English and French from the early postwar years to the opening of the first World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966.

With the backdrop of new global powers, this volume interrogates the state of writing in English. Strongly interdisciplinary, it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of postcolonial literary theory. An insistence on fieldwork and linguistics makes this book scene-changing in its approach to understanding and reading emerging literature in English.

Scholars examining literature from former French colonies sometimes view it wrongly as simply an outgrowth of colonial literature. By suggesting new ways to understand the multiple voices present, this book explores how Francophone African poetry and theatre in particular, since the 1960s, constitute both an organic cultural product and a reflection of the diverse African cultures in which they originate. Themes explored in five chapters include the many kinds of African identity formation, the resistance to former notions of literary composition as art, a remapping of social responsibility, and the impact of globalization on Francophone Africa's participation in world economics, politics and culture. This study highlights the inner workings of Francophone African literature and suggests a canonization of modern Francophone works from a world perspective.

An interdisciplinary, code-switching, critical collection by revisionist African American scholar and activist Bernard W. Bell.