'A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.' So argues Wole Soyinka, in his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, and this provides the overarching thematic concept for African pasts as a whole. Colonialism for Africans is not an event encapsulated in the past, but is a history whose repercussions and traumatic consequences are still actively evolving in today's political, historical, cultural and artistic scenes. African pasts examines African literatures in English since the end of colonialism, investigating how they represent...

The current resurgence of ethics in the beleaguered humanities reflects an increasing anxiety about the value and utility of critical/philosophical debate in the wake of poststructuralism. This book addresses this 'return to ethics' in relation to a wide variety of theories and texts. It covers substantial areas of ethical debate, particularly in relation to queer politics, biography, history, postmodernism, atrocity literature, utilitarianism, pedagogy and the philosophy of science. Theorists discussed in the volume include Rorty, Heidegger, Levinas, Mill, Lyotard, Leavis, Kuhn, Davidson,...

The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts. Ethical and literary issues explored by the contributors include biography, sensibility, national identity, feminism, postcolonialism, religion, subjectivity and stylistics. Literary authors and philosophers/theorists discussed range from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Michele Roberts and Salman Rushdie, and from Kant and Coleridge to Derrida and Levinas.