Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> African

"Quite simply: these are seminal essays.... Distinguished scholarship, erudite, and full of innovative ways of interpreting Arabic and Persian poetry." --Omar Pound

" This book] reads Arabic and Persian poetry in a refreshingly new and significant way.... raises our understanding... to a new level." --James T. Monroe

Innovative methodologies reorient critical readings of classical Middle Eastern literature.

"A struggle between two memories" is how Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish describes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Within this struggle, the meanings of land and home have been challenged and questioned, so that even heaps of stones become points of contention. Are they proof of ancient Hebrew settlement, or rubble from a bulldozed Palestinian village? The memory of these stones, and of the land itself, is nurtured and maintained in Palestinian writing and other modes of expression, which are used to confront and counter Israeli images and rhetoric. This struggle provides a...

In November 1988 Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In this study of his writings only now being widely translated into English, Haim Gordon, an Israeli professor committed to intercultural dialogue, examines Mahfouz's work from an existential perspective. While Mahfouz is first and foremost a storyteller, he gives the reader an extra baksheesh. By telling stories of persons from all walks of life--civil servants, peasants, pimps, lawyers, and businessmen--Mahfouz depicts the existential problems that Egyptians face today. Using a Socratic...

In this first full-length study of Emecheta's fiction, Fishburn highlights the difficulties inherent in reading across cultures. She challenges the notion that all we need to understand African texts is a willingness to be open to them, arguing that too many of the cultural and critical preconceptions we bring to these texts interfere with our ability to understand them. Directly responding to Western feminist criticism written about Emecheta, this study argues that Emecheta herself is not a feminist in the Western sense and that her novels should not be construed as reflecting this...

Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" is one of the most influential works of South African literature. Appearing at a time when the South African political system was being increasingly questioned, the novel drew worldwide attention to the horrors of apartheid, a political institution promoting segregation and discrimination. This book overviews Paton's novel and its social and political contexts. It discusses South African history and provides a sample of documents related to the origin of apartheid and the challenges facing South Africans under the segregationist regime. In doing so,...

African literature is a vast subject of growing output and interest. Written especially for students, this book selectively surveys the topic in a clear and accessible way. Included are roughly 600 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, genres, and major works. Many entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

Africa is a land of contrasts and of diverse cultures and traditions. It is also a land of conflict and creativity. The literature of the continent draws upon a fascinating body of oral traditions and lore and also...

Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of her years as a public figure--an observer of apartheid and its aftermath, a member of the ANC, and the champion of dissident writers everywhere.

In a letter to fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes Living in Hope and History as a "modest book of some of the nonfiction pieces I've written, a reflection of...

Medieval Andalusian Courtly Culture discusses the unicum manuscript of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, the only illustrated manuscript known to have survived for more than eight centuries of Muslim and Arabic-speaking presence in present-day Spain. The manuscript is of paramount importance as it contains the only known surviving version, both in terms of text and of image, of the love story of Bayad wa Riyad.

This study will place this manuscript within the context of late medieval Mediterranean courtly culture, offering:

• an annotated translation into...

Made up of a number of seminal articles that are translated for the first time in English, this prestigious book from Gregor Schoeler gives a reasoned, informed and comprehensive overflow of how the written and the spoken interacted, diverged and received cultural articulation among the Muslim societies of the first two centuries of the Hijra.

The writer and politician Mahmud al-Mis'adi is a figure of prime importance in the development of North African literature and cultural politics since the last war. This fascinating book covers both his essays and fiction, written between the 1930s and 1990s, which challenge the boundaries between the sacred and irreligious in the Islamic world. In addition, it also examines Arabic literature and its relationship to the West.

This book explores the complex relationship between the novel and identity in modern Arab culture against a backdrop of contemporary Egypt. It uses the example of the Egyptian novel to interrogate the root causes - religious, social, political, and psychological - of the lingering identity crisis that has afflicted Arab culture for at least two centuries.

The book examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the "developing" nations of the East. The practices of development have mostly led not to economic, social, and political progressivism in local society but rather to instability, poverty, debt, and repression. "Modernization" may therefore be seen as the catalyst of anti-Western reaction. The record of exploitative "development" is traceable in the anti-colonial works of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as in the...

Africa's history has been misrepresented by the outside world, especially by the Judeo-Christian West. An awareness of such a bias in historiographical discourse explains much of the difficulty Africans and peoples of African descent have in formulating a viable identity in intellectual discourse. Egypt, not Greece, is the cradle of spirituality, poetics, and metaphysics/philosophy. This book shows how recovering originary Nilotic philosophy is one of the few truly viable ways of rethinking philosophy and literary theory in the wake of the nihilist perspective with which postmodernism and...