African Literature Books

New and Published Books

1. Literature and Development in North Africa

   The Modernizing Mission

   By Perri Giovannucci

   Series: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

   The book examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the "developing" nations of the East. The practices of development have mostly led not to economic, social, and political progressivism in local...

   Published May 14th 2012 by Routledge
2. Representing Africa in Children's Literature

   Old and New Ways of Seeing

   By Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

   Series: Children's Literature and Culture

   Representing Africa in Children’s Literature explores how African and Western authors portray youth in contemporary African societies, critically examining the dominant images of Africa and Africans in books published between 1960 and 2005. The book focuses on contemporary children’s and young...

   Published September 18th 2011 by Routledge
3. Transnationalism in Southern African Literature

   Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture

   By Stefan Helgesson

   Series: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

   Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese...

   Published August 15th 2011 by Routledge
4. Neo-Imperialism in Children's Literature About Africa

   A Study of Contemporary Fiction

   By Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Donnarae MacCann

   Series: Children's Literature and Culture

   In the spirit of their last collaboration, Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985-1995, Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann once again come together to expose the neo-imperialist overtones of contemporary children's fiction about Africa. Examining the portrayal of...

   Published August 14th 2011 by Routledge
5. Close to the Sources

   Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy

   By Abebe Zegeye, Maurice Vambe

   Series: Routledge African Studies

   European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of...

   Published March 14th 2011 by Routledge
6. Nadine Gordimer's July's People

   A Routledge Study Guide

   By Brendon Nicholls

   Series: Routledge Guides to Literature

   Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers to emerge in the twentieth century. Her anti-Apartheid novel July's People (1981) is a powerful example of resistance writing and continues even now to unsettle easy assumptions about issues of power, race, gender and identity. This guide to...

   Published September 9th 2010 by Routledge
7. Recharting the Black Atlantic

   Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections

   Edited by Annalisa Oboe, Anna Scacchi

   Series: Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies

   This book focuses on the migrations and metamorphoses of black bodies, practices, and discourses around the Atlantic, particularly with regard to current issues such as questions of identity, political and human rights, cosmopolitics, and mnemo-history....

   Published July 13th 2010 by Routledge
8. Heroism and the Supernatural in the African Epic

   By Mariam Konaté Deme

   Series: African Studies

   There exists a strong tendency within Western literary criticism to either deny the existence of epics in Africa or to see African literatures as exotic copies of European originals. In both cases, Western criticism has largely failed to acknowledge the distinctiveness of African...

   Published June 23rd 2010 by Routledge
9. African Discourse in Islam, Oral Traditions, and Performance

   By Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah

   Series: African Studies

   Through an engaged analysis of writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Niyi Osundare, and Tanure Ojaide and of African traditional oral poets like Omoekee Amao Ilorin and Mamman Shata Katsina, Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah develops an African indigenous discourse paradigm for interpreting and...

   Published October 4th 2009 by Routledge
10. Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations

    Edited by Toyin Falola, Fallou Ngom

    Series: Routledge African Studies

    This volume brings together insights from distinguished scholars from around the world to address the facts, fiction and creative imaginations in the pervasive portrayals of Africa, its people, societies and cultures in the literature and the media. The fictionalization of Africa and African issues...

    Published August 5th 2009 by Routledge