African literature, like the continent itself is enormous and diverse. East Africa's literature is different from West Africa's which is quite different from South Africa's which has different influences on it than North Africa's. Africa's literature is based on a widespread heritage of oral literature, some of which has now been recorded. Arabic influence can be detected as well as European, especially French and English. Legends, myths, proverbs, riddles and folktales form the mother load of the oral literature. This book presents an overview of African literature as well as a comprehensive bibliography, primarily of English language sources. Accessed by subject, author and title indexes.

Includes a special section on teaching Yeats

Lorsque l'alphabet et l'écriture finissent par envahir irrévocablement une collectivité, qu'il s'agisse des Nambikwaras en Amazonie (Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques) ou de l'Acadie littéraire d'Antonine Maillet, ils la transforment de fond en comble. L'entrée dans la «galaxie Gutenberg» (McLuhan) a le plus souvent été caractérisée comme une perte, tant sur le plan socioculturel qu'au niveau de la création écrite individuelle. Aussi le présent volume propose-t-il de réhabiliter l'oral non seulement en le récupérant dans les textes, mais aussi en décelant l'influence qu'il peut avoir sur l'écrit.

The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions. Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language. Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.

In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not as guiding “truths” by which to define the permanent “meaning” of Romanticism, but as data of cultural history that shed important light on an evolving civilization.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.