Overview

This volume offers literary histories and analyses of a wide range of genres in African literature and verbal arts. It provides a holistic and accessible presentation of African literary history that incorporates different types of texts, different regions of the continent, and different languages (English, French, Swahili, Hausa). Both genres with a longer history and those with more recent histories in Africa receive attention. The genres covered include memoirs, travelogues, Shairi, protest poetry, activist theatre, dictator novels, child soldier narratives, prison writing, speculative fiction, market literature, environmental literature, graphic narrative, and queer writing. The volume furnishes overviews of other genres such as campus narrative, crime fiction, and romance. Genres belonging to popular culture as well as those associated with high literary forms are discussed. This collection of literary histories also shows how popular and high literary cultures have intersected and diverged in different locations across Africa since the early 1900s.

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9781009694643

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Author Information

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor at the University of California, Davis and author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar (1996), and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (2004). She is a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019).

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