You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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, privat...
Islam, like the West, is not a homogenous monolith. However, Islam is most commonly represented in the West in terms of suicide bombing, suppressed and veiled women, and internal and external conflict. These depictions of Islam suggest that the relationship between Islam and the West is, and has always been, one of hostility and hatred. However, this collection locates threads of connection and 'love' between Islam and the West, and argues that it is important to bring them to the forefront i ...
This book is an exploration of the perceptions of the American and British governments about Islam and Muslims based upon their experiences over the past two centuries. It provides a response to the accusation that US and British governments are inherently anti-Islamic and are seeking the destruction of that faith through their policy decisions. The book uses primary documents from the US and British governments to examine the attitudes of politicians and officials in a variety contexts ranging from the ‘War on Terror’, the Iranian Revolution and the ‘Trojan Horse’ Scandal to the conversion of Alexander Russell Webb to Islam, Islamic Finance and Mosque-building. In so doing it provides a wide-angle lens on the diversity of issues and experiences which have shaped the views of officials and politicians about Islam.
Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.
From his first book publication in 1958, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages, and he has always had a strong following in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his work remains strong among European scholars. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on Updike's oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar/readers from both Western and Eastern Europe--back cover.
The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire. During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, ...
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.
This book examines three fictional works by the writer Laila Abu Al-Ela, including two novels: “The Translator,” and “The Generosity of the Enemies,” and the other is a short story: the Ostrich. The research proposes the hypothesis that the selected fictional works present a balanced map of human relations through a perspective that calls for coexistence between cultures of multiple races and origins, and does not contradict the concept of resistance to a dominant mono-Western culture. This thesis is divided into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction, a simplified presentation of some of the theories influencing the writing of literature, such as the ...
This book is a collection of selected papers which have been delivered at numerous international conferences. They are classified into two main categories: poetry and prose. The first section deals with poetry of the Pre-Romantic, Romantic, modern, and contemporary eras, while the section on prose concerns the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination ...