This book analyzes how Francophone narratives written from the 1950s to the 1990s explore the struggle to craft decolonized forms of Islamic identity within sub-Saharan and North African societies. Considering major narratives by Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mariama Ba, Assia Djebar, Rachid Boudjedra, Yambo Ouologuem, and Amadou Kourouma, Donald Wehrs highlights not only the writers' often sharply divergent attitudes toward Islam and varying assessments of possible relations between Islamic selfhood neither uncritical of Western modernity nor unreflectively hostile toward it. In...

In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth century s most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity s Rainbow, as well as with such innovative recent works as Tony Kushner s Angels in America and Gabrielle Ghermandi s Regina di fiori e di perle, depicting Italian colonization of...