The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature 2 Volume Hardback Set
Author(s): F. Abiola Irele (Author), Simon Gikandi (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 11 Mar. 2004
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 954 pages
ISBN-10: 0521594340
ISBN-13: 9780521594349
Book Description
This history offers new perspectives on African and Caribbean literature. It provides the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history. Chapters address the literature itself, the practices and conditions of its composition, and its complex relationship with African social and geopolitical history. The book provides an account of the entire body of productions that can be considered to comprise the field of African literature, defined both by imaginative expression in Africa itself and the black diaspora. The book accounts for the specific historical and cultural context in which this expression has been manifested in African and the Caribbean: the formal particularities of the literary corpus, both oral and written, that can be ascribed to the two areas, and the diversity of material and texts covered by the representative works. This magisterial history of African literature is an essential resource for specialists and students.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘… begins with some excellent essays on how African societies have shaped the oral culture from which they emerged.’ The Times Literary Supplement
‘… readers will find here valuable individual essays, well edited and handsomely presented.’ New West Indian Guide
Book Description
This magisterial history of African literature is an essential resource for specialists and students.
About the Author
Professor F. Abiola Irele’s publications include an annotated edition of Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981; reprinted 1990), and an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999), as well as numerous articles and reviews and a recent volume of essays, The African Imagination (2001). He is a contributing editor to the new Norton Anthology of World Literature and is currently editor of Research in African Literatures. He is general editor of the series Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.
SIMON GIKANDI is Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature.
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