African Literature

Western criticism has largely failed to acknowledge the distinctiveness of African literary aesthetics. This book revises traditional literary canons in examining the social, cultural and emotional specificity of African epics and highlighting distinguishing features, such as the significance of the..

This book focuses on the cultural politics of magical realism, as exemplified in the fiction of Syl Cheney-Coker, Ben Okri and Kojo Laing and contextualizes their fiction within current debate...

This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that the mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project, but that his fiction also creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls..

This book significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema and Nollywood, it examines the often-neglected aestheti..

This study examines what J.M. Coetzee's novels portray as the circumstances that contribute to the humiliation of the individual--namely the abuse of language, master and slave interplay, aging and senseless waiting--and how these conditions can lead to the alienation and marginalization of the indi..

In this highly exciting re-reading of the classic works of Haggard and Kipling, Gail Ching-Liang Low explores how the colonialised Other is a mirror reflecting the images of the coloniser - `a cultural cross-dressing.'..

Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. Writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, producing works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent...

Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. Writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, producing works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent...