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This reference book surveys the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.
This guide offers listings of some 300 Francophone women from around the world & their work. Wherever possible, entries include dates, brief biographies, descriptions & brief critical analyses.
Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the...
An analysis of the use made of five structuring devices, or motifs -- the Bildungsroman, the patriarchal prison, the fairy tale, sexual politics and gender trouble --in a selection of representative women's novels from Spain and Latin America written between 1936 and the present. STEPHEN M. HART is Reader in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London.
V. 1. International dimensions of Black women's writing -- .
What are the political implications of an Arab feminist writing practice? How do the works of Assia Djebar, Algeria’s internationally acclaimed francophone writer, relate to the priorities and perspectives of both Western and Arab feminist politics? Does Djebar succeed in her aim of reclaiming the history of her homeland, and of her religion, Islam, for women? Or in reclaiming the sexuality of Arab women? In Assia Djebar: In Dialogue with Feminisms, Priscilla Ringrose uncovers the mechanisms of Djebar’s revisionary feminism and examines the echoes and dissonances between what Djebar terms her “own kind of feminism” and the thinking of French and Arab feminists such as Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Mernissi and Ahmed. Arguing that Djebar’s work is in constant dialogue with other feminisms, Ringrose assesses the strengths and weaknesses of its ideals and identifies their own particular intervention into current political and cultural debates. This book will appeal not only to scholars working on Djebar, but also to students of colonial history, women’s studies and cultural politics.
Essentially a comparative and contrastive analysis, Writing Otherwise examines the prose of five French women authors: Liliane Atlan, Marguerite Duras, Liliane Giraudon, Marie Redonnet, and Monique Wittig. Through close readings of texts published after 1985, this book explores the broad concerns and preoccupations infusing the ontological enterprise that is écriture. While maintaining a sensitivity to the diversity of styles and themes, as well as the unique qualities of the poetic voice evident in the five texts under consideration, this study seeks to highlight, in very general terms, what is common to them. The intertextual ground that informs the works, the construction of subjectivity, and the ambivalence and tension inherent to the practice writing constitute significant and important areas of convergence. These features form the ground of each chapter, while specific areas of divergence complete the discussion of individual aesthetics. Inspired by feminist literary theory, Writing Otherwise is also concerned with how these five women writers negotiate their relationship to writing.
African literatures, says volume editor Oyekan Owomoyela, "testify to the great and continuing impact of the colonizing project on the African universe." African writers must struggle constantly to define for themselves and other just what "Africa" is and who they are in a continent constructed as a geographic and cultural entity largely by Europeans. This study reflects the legacy of colonialism by devoting nine of its thirteen chapters to literature in "Europhone" languages—English, French, and Portuguese. Foremost among the Anglophone writers discussed are Nigerians Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka. Writers from East Africa are also represented, as are those from South Afri...
This book shows through criticism the richness, the complexity, and the far-reaching significance of the writings of Anne Hebert, the Quebequain novelsit and poet who first achieved recognition in he 1940s and '50s. The writings, by such notables as Gaetan, Brulotte, Neil Bishop, Annabelle Rea, Lori Saint-Martin, Roseanna Dufault, and many others, are variously in English and in French. Prefaced by renowned Hebertian scholar Janet Pallister, and introduced by Pallister's essay on the life and accomlishment of Anne Henert, the work is accompanied by a large bibliography of the works of Anne Hebert.