Description
Book SynopsisThe rapid upsurge of writing by African women has been one of the most dynamic, phenomenal trends of African literature at the end of the twentieth century.African women writers have come a long way since the 1960s when they were hardly acknowledged or noticed as serious writers. In the past four decades their works have been steadily rising in quantity and quality. Today these writers are seriously redefining images of womanhood, providing new visions, and reshaping erstwhile distorted characterizations of African women in fiction. ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana StudiesUniversity of Michigan-Flint. North America: Africa World Press; Nigeria: HEBN
Trade ReviewErnest Emenyonu has certainly continued in the excellent tradition set by Eldred Jones, but he has widened the scope of the journal. There is every indication that this journal will be responding to the development of African literatures in its focus. -- Ezenwa-Ohaeto * RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES *
The collection of essays is most valuable for the range of African women writers included - new voices addressing contemporary issues, established writers working in new genres. But above all, the way the critics included here root their perspectives in African contexts and draw on those approaches to women's writing which offer insight into their national and psychological realities, gives readers a clear sense of where women's writing in Africa is at the present. * ALA BULLETIN (African Literature Association) *
Table of ContentsEditorial - To trans-emote a cosmos: Yvonne Vera's holistic feminist vision in Butterfly Burning by Chimalum Nwankwo - Season of desert flowers: contemporary women's poetry from Northern Nigeria by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade - Calixthe Beyala rebels against female oppression by Tunde Fatunde - Representations of the womanist discourse in the short fiction of Akachi Ezigbo & Chinwe Okechukwu by Ijeoma Nwajiaku - From liminality to centrality: Kekelwa Nyanya's Hearthstones by Monica Bungaro - Ken Bugul's Le Boabab fou: a female story about a female body by Ada Uzoamuka Azoda - Submit or kill yourself...your two choices: options for wives in African women's fiction by Helen Cousins - Exile & identity in Buchi Emecheta's The New Tribe by Clement A. Okafor - A failed sexual rebellion: the case of Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa by Iniobong I. Uko - Space within & space without: a reading of Zaynab Alkali's The Still Born by Hannah Ngozi Chukwu - Usurpation & the umbilical victim in Zulu Sofola's King Emene by Azubike Iloeje - Reviews section
