Bearing Witness

Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria

Häftad, Engelska, 2000

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Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These--together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe's writing--are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa's most populous nation. Drawing on interviews with Nigeria's writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels--from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces--Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern.Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2000-06-19
Mått152 x 235 x 22 mm
Vikt539 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SeriePrinceton Studies in Cultural Sociology
Antal sidor376
FörlagPrinceton University Press
ISBN9780691058290
UtmärkelserWinner of American Sociological Association Culture Section Distinguished Book Award 2002

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Sociologi och antropologi inom Samhalle och politik

Wendy Griswold is joint Professor of Sociology and English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980 and Cultures and Societies in a Changing World as well as coeditor of Literature and Social Practice and Places within, places beyond: the question of Norwegian regionalism in literature.

Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Key Dates In Nigerian History xv CHAPTER 1 To Understand the Novel in Nigeria 3 In Nigeria 6 The Novel 13 To Understand 17 CHAPTER 2 The Nigerian Fiction Complex 26 The Novels 29 The Writers 38 The Business 60 The Readers 88 CHAPTER 3 Nigerian Novels 120 Village and City 12 3 Women and Men 167 Pen and Sword 208 Crime and Politics 238 CHAPTER 4 Capturing the Past and Inventing the Future 269 APPENDIX A. Nigerian novels 275 APPENDIX B. Nigerian authors 288 APPENDIX C. Coding forms 292 Notes 297 Bibliography 323 INDEX 333

Winner of the 2002 Best Book Award "By using extensive interviews with publishers, booksellers, and readers, along with surveys and her own insights into the novels, Griswold offers on of the few truly comprehensive views of the world of literature in Africa. It is also a wonderfully optimistic book that suggests the vitality of the written word in contemporary Nigerian life."--Choice "Griswold wears her learning lightly, using footnotes to show broader debates, keeping her text uncluttered... Bearing Witness provides a useful counterbalance to much detached, contemporary literary criticism; it demonstrates the needs for novels to be examined by scholars from a variety of disciplines."--James Gibbs, World Literature Today "It is rare to find an American scholar so committed to and successful in melding the approaches of the social sciences and the humanities as Griswold does."--Vera Zolberg, American Journal of Sociology "To those readers who have explicit memories of Nigeria, whether good or not so good: Please read Wendy Griswold's Bearing Witness. And likewise to those who have never been to Nigeria: please read Grisworld's book. In other words, for anyone with an interest in historical political, cultural, and literary development in Nigeria (and Africa in general), Bearing Witness is a very good book."--Glen Bush, African Studies Review