Texts, Tasks, and Theories

African literary theory has recently gained immensely from an emerging multitude of perspectives and scholarly approaches. This volume offers a welcome opportunity to assess trends in the twenty-first century’s discourse on African literature: Twelve different articles treat such lively issues as modernity, nation, civil society, postcolonial theory, and feminism, relating these both to more recent short stories, poems, and novels and to a large variety of texts that have in one way or another acquired canonical status. The first section “Language, Modernity and Modernism” explores ocial and aesthetic figurations of modernity in African literary discourse. “New Readings in African Literature and Postcolonial Theory” offers fresh and critical approaches to this hotly contested area. In the closing section, “Identity, Dissidence and Cultural Practice,” the questions tackled concern the role of literature and the African writer in an increasingly plural and diversifying social environment. Some of the authors treated in detail are: Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Okot p’Bitek, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Kojo Laing, Alexander Kanengoni, Farida Karodia, Lewis Nkosi, Flora Nwapa, Ike Oguine, Ben Okri, and Wole Soyinka.