The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel

Abstract

Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka, and J.M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa South of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical statusan entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebeor can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures. f. abiola irele is Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His recent publications include The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, edited with Simon Gikandi (Cambridge, 2004).

Semba y rumba - construyendo ritmos y expectativas en dos novelas africanas

“…Llama la atención, sin embargo, que en el caso de Dongala y Mendonça, la música abra el panorama hacia un escenario postcolonial con tono político, al igual que en las obras del llamado boom de la novela latinoamericana. Este escenario, obviamente, agrega una dimensión nueva a la novela africana, la que no es relevada en las contribuciones de The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, editado por Francis Abiola Irele (2009). Esta dimensión musical, aparentemente, permite identificar las novelas de Dongala y Mendonça con las características de la "nueva novela latinoamericana", según lo formulado por Saúl Sosnowski en su Cartografía de las letras hispanoamericanas: tejidos de la memoria: "La capacidad de abandonar lo heredado, un sentimiento de total liberación que se deslizaba por la lengua, la revolución, el sexo, la droga, la música, y la adhesión de un público cada vez más amplio, iban compaginando el acceso a lo que muchos entusiastas consideraban una literatura utópica" (Sosnowski, 2015: 51).…”

A Realist Interpretation of Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

“…However, the African novel emerged from the contact of Africa and Europe through Trans-Atlantic trade, colonialism and the introduction of Western education. In this case, Irele (2010) states that Africa has had a long and enduring tradition of poetry and drama, the novel is today, as almost everywhere else in the world, the dominant literary genre on the continent. Its privileged status as a written genre may be attributed to European influence and its association with an imaginative consciousness grounded in literate modernity.…”