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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information the cambridge companion to the african novel Africa’s strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka, and J.M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa South of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical status – an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebe – or can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures. f. abiola irele is Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His recent publications include The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, edited with Simon Gikandi (Cambridge, 2004). A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO THE AFRICAN NOVEL EDITED BY F. ABIOLA IRELE © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru,UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521671682 © Cambridge University Press 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-0-521-85560-0 hardback isbn 978-0-521-67168-2 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information CONTENTS Notes on contributors page vii Acknowledgments xi Chronology xii 1 Introduction: perspectives on the African novel f. abiola irele 1 2 The oral–literate interface olakunle george 15 3 Chinua Achebe and the African novel dan izevbaye 31 4 Protest and resistance barbara harlow 51 5 The Afrikaans novel christopher warnes 69 6 The African novel in Arabic shaden m. tageldin 85 7 The francophone novel in North Africa bernard aresu 103 8 The francophone novel in sub-Saharan Africa lydie moudileno 125 9 The African historical novel m. keith booker 141 v © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information contents 10 Magical realism and the African novel ato quayson 159 11 The African novel and the feminine condition nana wilson-tagoe 177 12 Autobiography and Bildungsroman in African literature apollo amoko 195 13 The postcolonial condition phyllis taoua 209 14 New voices, emerging themes dominic thomas 227 15 The critical reception of the African novel harry garuba 243 Bibliography 263 Index 272 vi © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS apollo amoko is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida. His teaching and research interests are postcolonial theory and literatures (with specific emphasis on African literature), critical theory, cultural studies (race, gender, and sexuality studies), ethnic literatures of Canada and the United States, and modern drama. He has published essays in such journals as Modern Drama, Callaloo, Mosaic, and Research in African Literatures. He is completing a manuscript on citizenship, canonicity and the invention of modern African literature. bernard aresu teaches French Studies and Humanities at Rice University. His research deals with poets and novelists writing in French. His publications cover a plurality of North African writers and artists. They include Counterhegemonic Discourse From the Maghreb: The Poetics of Kateb’s Fiction, a monograph on Tahar Ben Jelloun, as well as articles on Abdelkebir Khatibi, Rachid Mimouni, Assia Djebar, Mohammed Khadda, Boualem Sansal, and Salim Bachi. He is cur- rently at work on The Self in Dissidence: Mediterranean Fictions as well as on a translation of Kateb Yacine’s theatre. m. keith booker is the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He has written or edited more than thirty books on literature, literary theory, and popular culture. His publications include The African Novel in English: An Introduction (1998), The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction (2001, co-authored by Dubravka Juraga). He is also the editor of The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia (2003). harry garuba is Associate Professor at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town with a joint appointment in the English Department. In 2005–6,he was a Mellon Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas in Austin and later a Mandela Fellow at the WEB Dubois Institute, Harvard University. His recent publications include “Mapping the Land/ Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies in African Narrative” (Alternation, 2002), “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/ Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society” (Public Culture, Spring 2003), vii © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information notes on contributors “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-Figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry” (English in Africa, May 2005). olakunle george is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003), and his articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Diacritics, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Representations, and Research in African Literatures. barbara harlow teaches literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire,I,From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and XI, The Scramble for Africa (2003), and co-editor with Ferial Ghazoul of The View from Within: Writers and Critics and Contemporary Arabic Literature (1994), and with Toyin Falola of two volumes of essays in honor of Bernth Lindfors, Palavers of African Literature and African Writers and Readers (2002). She is currently working on an intellectual biography of the South African writer and activist, Ruth First. f. abiola irele was formerly Professor of French at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and Professor of African, French and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University, from which he retired in 2003. Since then, he has been Visiting Professor at Harvard in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures. Professor Irele’s publications include annotated editions of Selected Poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977) and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999), and two collections of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981, reprinted 1990) and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (2001). He is co-editor, with Simon Gikandi, of the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature. From 1992 to 2003, he served as Editor of the journal Research in African Literatures; he is currently Editor (with Tommie Shelby) of Transition Magazine. dan izevbaye took BA and PhD degrees at the University of Ibadan. He taught at the University of Lagos, and for many years at the University of Ibadan where he retired as Professor in 2004. He has held visiting appointments at universities in the UK, the US and South Africa and was a 1989 Senior Fulbright Fellow. He currently teaches at Bowen University, Iwo, Nigeria, where he is Dean of the Arts Faculty. He is a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, of which he was President from 2001 to 2006. His publications include essays on the major figures of African literature. viii © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85560-0 - The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel Edited by F. Abiola Irele Frontmatter More information notes on contributors Apart from literature, his research interest includes communication and the enter- tainment media. lydie moudileno is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.