Ngugi's Novels And African History

Ngugi's Novels And African History PDF Author: James Ogude
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745314310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Africa’s most controversial and renowned literary figures. This comprehensive study explores the relationship between history and narrative in his novels.

The Rise of the African Novel

The Rise of the African Novel PDF Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205368X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

Weep Not, Child

Weep Not, Child PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110158484X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s powerful first novel Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures: Njoroge is to attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. But this is Kenya, and the times are against them: In the forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up. The first East African novel published in English, Weep Not, Child explores the effects of the infamous Mau Mau uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women, and on one family in particular. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Perfect Nine

The Perfect Nine PDF Author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975262
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author Delia Owens says “tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a continent” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's novels and memoirs have received glowing praise from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and NPR; he has been a finalist for the Man International Booker Prize and is annually tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and his books have sold tens of thousands of copies around the world. In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngũgĩ tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine” —and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice. Ngũgĩ's epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”

Petals of Blood

Petals of Blood PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101662468
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
“The definitive African book of the twentieth century” (Moses Isegawa, from the Introduction) by the Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time. First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.

Decolonising the Mind

Decolonising the Mind PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0852555016
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading PDF Author: Brendon Nicholls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317087585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project from his first novel to his most recent one. Nicholls describes the historical pressures that lead Ngugi to represent women as he does, and shows that the novels themselves are symptomatic of the cultural conditions that they address. Reading Ngugi's fiction in terms of its Gikuyu allusions and references, a gendered narrative of history emerges that creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls bases his discussion on moments during the Mau Mau rebellion when women's contributions to the anticolonial struggle could not be reduced to a patriarchal narrative of Kenyan history, and this interpretive maneuver permits a reading of Ngugi's fiction that accommodates female political and sexual agency. Nicholls contributes to postcolonial theory by proposing a methodology for reading cultural difference. This methodology critiques cultural practices like clitoridectomy in an ethical manner that seeks to avoid both cultural imperialism and cultural relativisim. His strategy of 'performative reading,' that is, making the conditions of one text (such as folklore, history, or translation) active in another (for example, fiction, literary narrative, or nationalism), makes possible an ethical reading of gender and of the conditions of reading in translation.

The Black Hermit

The Black Hermit PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: East African Publishers
ISBN: 9789966469052
Category : Kenya
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description


Wizard of the Crow

Wizard of the Crow PDF Author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo
Publisher: East African Publishers
ISBN: 9789966254917
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Book Description


A Grain of Wheat

A Grain of Wheat PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: East African Publishers
ISBN: 9789966460073
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description