Author: Ernest Emenyo̲nuPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
The Rise of the Igbo Novel
Author: Ernest Emenyo̲nuPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
The Literary History of the Igbo Novel
Author: Ernest N. EmenyonuPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000040704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
This book looks at the trends in the development of the Igbo novel from its antecedents in oral performance, through the emergence of the first published novel, Omenuko, in 1933 by Pita Nwana, to the contemporary Igbo novel. Defining "Igbo literature" as literature in Igbo language, and "Igbo novel" as a novel written in Igbo language, the author argues that oral and written literature in African indigenous languages hold an important foundational position in the history of African literature. Focusing on the contributions of Igbo writers to the development of African literature in African languages, the book examines the evolution, themes, and distinctive features of the Igbo novel, the historical circumstances of the rise of the African novel in the pre-colonial, era and their impact on the contemporary Igbo novel. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature, literary history, and Igbo studies.
The Rise of the African Novel
Author: Mukoma Wa NgugiPublisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047212336X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
The Rise of the African Novel is the first book to situate South African and African-language literature of the late 1880s through the early 1940s in relation to the literature of decolonization that spanned the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary generation of established and emerging continental and diaspora African writers of international renown. Calling it a major crisis in African literary criticism, Mukoma Wa Ngugi considers key questions around the misreading of African literature: Why did Chinua Achebe’s generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa’s literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past? While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures. This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.
Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua AchebePublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0385474547
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Book Description
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
The Rise of the Igbo Novel
Author: Ernest Emenyo̲nuPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The Rise of the African Novel
Author: Mukoma Wa NgugiPublisher: 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
Omenuko
Author: Nwana, PitaPublisher: African Heritage Press
ISBN: 1940729173
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
Omenụkọ (real name: Igwegbe Odum) whose home in Okigwe, Eastern Nigeria, was a popular spot for field trips by students in schools and colleges, as well as a favourite attraction for tourists in the decades before and after the Nigerian Independence in 1960. Generations of Igbo children began their reading in Igbo with Omenụkọ, and those who did not have the opportunity to go to school still read Omenụkọ in their homes or at adult education centers. Omenụkọ was a legendary figure and his 'sayings' became part of the Igbo speech repertoire that young adults were expected to acquire. Omenụkọ, a classic in Igbo Literature, written by Pita Nwana and published in 1933 by Longman, Green & Co, Ltd, London, is in this translation made accessible to a global audience. Emenyonu utilizes his mastery of both languages (Igbo and English) to faithfully present to his audience a complete rendition of Omenụkọ as originally written. The timeless significance of this novel as a progenitor of the Igbo language novel is again underscored.
No Longer at Ease
Author: Chinua AchebePublisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435905286
Category : City and town life
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
Obi Okenkwo, a Nigerian country boy, is determined to make it in the city. Educated in England, he has new, refined tastes which eventually conflict with his good resolutions and lead to his downfall.
Half of a Yellow Sun
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi AdichiePublisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373541
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 562
Book Description
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
New York, My Village: A Novel
Author: Uwem AkpanPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881431
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379
Book Description
Exuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satire—by the celebrated and original author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Say You’re One of Them. From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly—callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories. Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.