Author: Katrin BerndtPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction
Author: Katrin BerndtPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Zimbabwean Transitions
Author: Mbongeni Z. MalabaPublisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042023767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
This collection of essays on Zimbabwean literature brings together studies of both Rhodesian and Zimbabwean literature, spanning different languages and genres. It charts the at times painful process of the evolution of Rhodesian/ Zimbabwean identities that was shaped by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial realities. The hybrid nature of the society emerges as different writers endeavour to make sense of their world. Two essays focus on the literature of the white settler. The first distils the essence of white settlers' alienation from the Africa they purport to civilize, revealing the delusional fixations of the racist mindset that permeates the discourse of the "white man's burden" in imperial narratives. The second takes up the theme of alienation found in settler discourse, showing how the collapse of the white supremacists' dream when southern African countries gained independence left many settlers caught up in a profound identity crisis. Four essays are devoted to Ndebele writing. They focus on the praise poetry composed for kings Mzilikazi and Lobengula; the preponderance of historical themes in Ndebele literature; the dilemma that lies at the heart of the modern Ndebele identity; and the fossilized views on gender roles found in the works of leading Ndebele novelists, both female and male. The essays on English-language writing chart the predominantly negative view of women found in the fiction of Stanley Nyamfukudza, assess the destabilization of masculine identities in post-colonial Zimbabwe, evaluate the complex vision of life and "reality" in Charles Mungoshi's short stories as exemplified in the tragic isolation of many of his protagonists, and explore Dambudzo Marechera's obsession with isolated, threatened individuals in his hitherto generally neglected dramas. The development of Shona writing is surveyed in two articles: the first traces its development from its origins as a colonial educational tool to the more critical works of the post-1980 independence phase; the second turns the spotlight on written drama from 1968 when plays seemed divorced from the everyday realities of people's lives to more recent work which engages with corruption and the perversion of the moral order. The volume also includes an illuminating interview with Irene Staunton, the former publisher of Baobab Books and now of Weaver Press.
Women as Artists in Contemporary Zimbabwe
Author: Kerstin BolztSign and Taboo
Author: Robert MupondePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signaled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anticolonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. She records public experience through the consciousness of her female characters; but in prose as densely allusive as poetry, does not allow her style to register with a conventional realism, her characters always experiencing more than they understand, and seeing more than they and the reader may recognize. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the center of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life.
Friends and Foes Volume I
Author: Barbara Gabriella RenziPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443804207
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 120
Book Description
The product of an international, multi-disciplinary conference at Queen’s University Belfast, the two-volume Friends and Foes series offers an illuminating investigation of the relationship between friendship and conflict by established and emerging scholars. In this first volume, which collects together philosophical and cultural essays on the topic, the authors raise and tackle some of the most pertinent issues central to the understanding, and making, of friendship. What constitutes friendship? What challenges, duties and pleasures does friendship entail? The ambiguity of friendship is a recurring theme in the book, and Mark Vernon’s essay on the philosophical history of thinking about friendship’s ambiguity provides the perfect point of entry for discussion of the compelling literary and theatrical representations which follow, in the work of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Gregory Burke, and Edgar Allan Poe.
The Place of Tears
Author: Ranka PrimoracPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857715690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
THIS IS AN NJR - NOT JACKET BLURB, DO NOT USE IT THIS RAW FORM -This new and original work is the only recent monographic treatment of the Zimbabwean novel and its political implications. An earlier one by Veit-Wild (1992) has not been updated, and other, such as that by Zhuwarara (2001), are not easily available outside Zimbabwe. The author resided in Zimbabwe for almost a decade and has visited the country regularly in the last five years. She has published extensively on Zimbabwean literature, and brings to her work a deep contextual richness as well as theoretical sophistication. Thoroughly up-to-date, the book examines all the published novels of the recently-deceased Yvonne Vera (d. April 2005) as well as major novels of five other internationally-acclaimed Zimbabwean writers, including Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chenjerai Hove. It does so against a political backdrop which goes right up to the March 2005 parliamentary elections. The book provides a modern and original historical account of post-independence Zimbabwean writing and its relationship to history and politics. The critical investigation focuses on fictional representations of space-time which links the book the tragically topical Zimbabwean issue of land. Dr Primorac employs a form of literary and cultural theory reminiscent of Bakhtinian analysis, but drawn at length from East European theoretical sources. She investigates what the novels have to say about the Zimbabwean condition, and makes a sophisticated link between ideas about space-time and novelistic ideologies. More than that, drawing a parallel with the experience of Eastern Europe, she shows how the novel itself breaks out of the confines of the quasi-Marxist analysis which still holds sway in Zimbabwe. As such, the Zimbabwean novel is itself a source of hope in that troubled land. Ranka Primorac has degrees from the universities of Zagreb, Zimbabwe and Nottingham Trent. She has taught Africa-related courses at several institutions of higher learning in Britain, including the University of Cambridge and New York University in London. She is interested in non-western writing and cultures, theoretical approaches to the novel and the narrative production of space-time. Her co-edited volume, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture was published in 2005 by Weaver Press in Harare.
Research in African Literatures
Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 464
Book Description
Vol. 1- , spring 1970- , include "A Bibliography of American doctoral dissertations on African literature," compiled by Nancy J. Schmidt.
Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa
Author: James GrahamPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135844011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
By employing a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, feminist and ecocritical— Graham investigates the relation between land and nationalism in South African and Zimbabwean fiction from the 1960s to the present. This study discusses a wide range of writing including novels by Coetzee, Gordimer, Head, Hove, and Vera.
The ‘Second World’ in Contemporary British Writing
Author: Katrin BerndtPublisher: V&R unipress
ISBN: 3737017573
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
The thirteen contributions to this collection all explore or exemplify the ongoing British interest in the socialist world before 1990. In autobiography, fiction, film, history, and lexicography, these chapters show how contemporary Britain is engaging with the past project to build socialism in Europe, and what this means for the present and the future of our continent. Contributions come from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, and the volume is further enriched by a short story especially written for this book and by an in-depth interview with the author of a recent popular history of the GDR. Together, these chapters offer a unique perspective into contemporary British writing on the ‘second world’ and the enduring fascination with the failures of futures past.
Contested Criminalities in Zimbabwean Fiction
Author: Tendai MangenaPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429807562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
This book addresses the ways in which writers deploy the trope of contested criminality to expose Zimbabwe's socially and politically oppressive cultures in a wide range of novels and short stories published in English between 1994 and 2016. Some of the most influential authors that are examined in this book are Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu and Virginia Phiri. The author uses the Zimbabwean experience to engage with critical issues facing the African continent and the world, providing a thoughtful reading of contemporary debates on illegal migration, homophobia, state criminality and gender inequalities. The thematic focus of the book represents a departure from what Schulze-Engler notes elsewhere as postcolonial discourse’s habit of suggesting that the legacies of colonialism and the predominance of the ‘global North’ are responsible for injustice in the Global South. Using the context of Zimbabwe, it is shown that colonialism is not the only image of violence and injustice, but that there are other forms of injustice that are of local origin. Throughout the book, it is argued that in speaking about contested criminalities, writers call attention to the fact that laws are violated, some laws are unjust and some crimes are henceforth justified. In this sense crime, (in)justice and the law are portrayed as unstable concepts.