The Following Is Most of the Text of the Presentation I Did at Readercon 29
The following is most of the text of the presentation I did at Readercon 29. I ran out of time, so I wasn't able to give the entire talk. And my Powerpoint file became corrupted, so I gave the presentation without the images, as I'd originally planned. Here, then, is the original, as requested by a couple of the folks who attended the presentation. THE HISTORY OF HORROR LITERATURE IN AFRICA IN THE 20TH CENTURY Horror literature has not been restricted to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, despite what critics and historians of the genre assume. Most countries which have a flourishing market for popular literature have seen natively-written horror fiction, whether in the form of dime novels, short stories, or novels. This is true of the European countries, whose horror writers are given at least a cursory mention in the broader types of horror criticism. But this is also true of countries outside of Europe, and in countries and continents where Western horror critics dare not tread, like Africa. Now, a thorough history of African horror literature is beyond the time I have today, so what follows is going to be a more limited coverage, of African horror literature in the twentieth century. I’ll be going alphabetically and chronologically through three time periods: 1901-1940, 1941-1970, and 1971-2000. I’d love to be able to tell you a unified theory of African horror literature for those time periods, but there isn’t one. Africa is far too large for that.
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