The African Writers Series is a wide-ranging series offering your students stories, poetry, biographical writings and essays from across Africa. It includes work from nearly 40 writers from 19 different countries. During its celebrated 45 years of publishing, the series has been a vehicle for some of the most important writers Africa has produced, such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Thomas Tebo is an enchanted, magical youth, who becomes dangerously involved in politics, and is eventually forced into depressing exile. This book provides an account of how a precocious, sensuous child loses his innocence.

The term 'recent' or 'new' covers novels and some short fiction published between 1980 and 1995, a period characterized by growing pessimism about the state of affairs in both East and West Africa. The section on South Africa deals more narrowly with the 1985-95 watershed marking the end of official apartheid and the beginning of reconstruction. The three sections aim at giving a coherent picture of the main directions in production, highlighting three main centres of interest, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Republic of South Africa, although some novelists from neighbouring countries are also considered (such as Kofi Awoonor from Ghana, Nuruddin Farah from Somalia, and M.G. Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah from Tanzania). The evaluations conducted in the three sections lead to the emergence of a number of common themes, in particular the writers' predilection for topicality, the role of the past, and the controversy over the idea of the nation. Central themes also include the role of women in fending for themselves, both in rural and in urban environments. A further major theme is the role of the past (the Nigerian civil war; the Mau Mau period in Kenya; the revisiting of slavery; the refurbishing of myth; the questioning of historical reconstructions). The preoccupation of the West, East, and South African novel with the idea and ideal of the 'nation' is explored, particularly in the context of migrancy, hybridity, and transculturalism characterizing the anglophone diaspora. The volume is aimed at literary scholars and students and, more generally, readers of fiction seeking an introduction to contemporary literary developments in various parts of sub-Saharan anglophone Africa. No categorical distinction is drawn between 'popular' and 'high' literature. Though still selective and not intended as an exhaustive catalogue, the present survey covers a large number of titles. Rather than resorting to broad and ultimately somewhat abstract thematic categories, the contributors endeavour to keep control over this mass of material by applying a 'micro-thematic' taxonomy. This approach, well-tested in the tradition of literary studies within France, groups works analytically and evaluatively in terms of such categories as actional motifs, plot-frames, and sociologically relevant locations or topics, thereby enabling a clearer focus on the dynamics of preoccupation and tendency that form networks of affinity across the fiction produced in the period surveyed.

Here is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.

The essays in this collection celebrate the signal achievement of Dieter Riemenschneider in helping found and consolidate the study of postcolonial anglophone literatures in Germany and Europe. As well as poems, a short story, drawings of the Indian scene (the first, and abiding, focus of this scholar’s work), and ‘letters’ of reminiscence (one quite grave), there are revealing contributions of a literary-historical nature on the establishment of anglophone (especially African) literatures as an academic discipline within Germany, the UK, and Northern Europe generally, as well as a group of searching reflections on such topics of postcolonial import as globalization and the applicability of models to the literature of the indigene in Canada and Australia. The largest section is devoted to individual topics, each treatment implicitly keyed to approaches to the teaching of New Literatures texts. Writers covered include Anita Desai (landscape and memory), Salman Rushdie (painting in The Moor’s Last Sigh), Charlotte Brontë (imperial discourse in Jane Eyre), Derek Walcott (Omeros and cultural cohabitation), and Witi Ihimaera (his rewriting of Katherine Mansfield). Topics dealt with include music and radio in West Africa, the African literary ‘hit parade’, the New Zealand prose poem, Canadian and Australian war fiction, the Middle Passage in the American and Caribbean novel, Paul Theroux’s uneasy relations with V.S. Naipaul, and the colonial discourse of illness and recuperation. The volume closes with Dieter Riemenschneider’s very first and most recent critical essays, the one a classic on Mulk Raj Anand, the other a challenging and doubtless controversial thesis on postcolonial minority writing. A select bibliography of Riemenschneider’s work (books, edited publications, journal articles and book contributions, reviews and broadcasts) rounds off this substantial collection.

This is the first reference guide to the political, cultural and economic histories that form the subject-matter of postcolonial literatures written in English.The focus of the Companion is principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world - Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, South-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Canada. There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have also claimed the title 'postcolonial', notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States. The Companion contains:*220 entries written by 150 acknowledged scholars of postcolonial history and literature;*covers major events, ideas, movements, and figures in postcolonial histories*long regional survey essays on historiography and women's histories. Each entry provides a summary of the historical event or topic and bibliographies of postcolonial literary works and histories. Extensive cross-references and indexes enable readers to locate particular literary texts in their relevant historical contexts, as well as to discover related literary texts and histories in other regions with ease.