by Donald R. Wehrs (2007)
"In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but import ant body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African Fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives."--Jacket.
Jahan Ramazani
Poetry is often regarded as being 'stubbornly national', with little influence outwith the country in which it is written. In this book however, the author reveals many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary pardigms.
Sigmund von Birken
This volume presents 430 poems and poem groups written by Sigmund von Birken, typically on commission, for bourgeois patrons and members of the city of Nuremberg's patrician class. The first subvolume contains the texts; the second subvolume the philological apparatus and commentaries. The book reveals the activity of a "literary service provider," and will be of interest to historians, theologians, and scholars of cultural and literary studies.
Ned Rorem
"Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities."--BOOK JACKET.
Thomas Fink
"This study analyzes the work of social poets who hail from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States. These figures, who emerged as poets in the last two decades, utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address issues of in/visibility, the erasure and reconstruction of history, and issues of inclusivity and exclusivity in formations of community. Issues of community raised involve race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual preference."--BOOK JACKET.