Literary Criticism : African

As the most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers, and she appears regularly on French television and radio, yet her reputation has in recent years been tarnished by allegations of plagiarism. She is lauded both as a consecrated, best-selling ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’, found guilty of plagiarism in the High Court in Paris but in the same year awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. In Calixthe Beyala , Nicki Hitchcott considers Beyala as an icon and a writer. She explores representations of Beyala in the media, the varied critical responses to her writing, and Beyala’s efforts to position herself as a champion of women’s rights in Africa. Hitchcott pays equal attention to the novels themselves, tracing their explorations of the role of migration in the creation of personal identity. Calixthe Beyala is a nuanced attempt to understand the work – and public role – of one of the most important women writing today. more...

Price: $70.00

A student-friendly guide to the life, work, context and reception of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. more...

Price: $18.00

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book contains over 600 entries that cover criticism and theory, its development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers. more...

Price: $59.95

A one-of-a-kind collection showcasing the energy of new African literature. Coming at a time when Africa and African writers are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance, Gods and Soldiers captures the vitality and urgency of African writing today. With stories from northern Arabic-speaking to southern Zulu-speaking writers, this collection conveys thirty different ways of approaching what it means to be African. Whether about life in the new urban melting pots of Cape Town and Luanda, or amid the battlefield chaos of Zimbabwe and Somalia, or set in the imaginary surreal landscapes born out of the oral storytelling tradition, these stories represent a striking cross section of extraordinary writing. Including works by J. M. Coetzee, Chimamanda Adichie, Nuruddin Farah, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Chinua Achebe, and edited by Rob Spillman of Tin House magazine, Gods and Soldiers features many pieces never before published, making it a vibrant and essential glimpse of Africa as it enters the twenty-first century. more...

Price: $16.00

Illuminating J.M. Coetzee's preoccupation, from Dusklands to Diary of a Bad Year, with the paradox of postcolonial authorship centering on the authority authorship engenders, Jane Poyner examines Coetzee's line of author-narrators to trace how he rehearses and revises his understanding of intellectual practice at a time of seismic change in South Africa. Her theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written book is a major contribution to our understanding of the Nobel Laureate and to postcolonial studies. more...

Price: $99.95