ABSTRACT

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.

Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works.

The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

chapter 1|18 pages

Introduction

part I|2 pages

Mapping Political Agencies

chapter 2|14 pages

‘Children of the Cold War’

Rethinking African literary generations through the global conflict

part II|2 pages

Journeys, Geographies, Identities

chapter 6|17 pages

Decolonising the Afropolitan

Intra-African migrations in post-2000 literature

chapter 7|18 pages

History, imperial eyes and the ‘mutual gaze’

Narratives of African-Chinese encounters in recent literary works

chapter 9|13 pages

Mythopoesis of the self

Nation, textuality and the writer as political hero

part III|2 pages

Working through Genres

chapter 10|15 pages

How to be a writer in your 30s in Lagos

Self-help literature and the creation of authority in Africa

chapter 11|16 pages

Gothic supernaturalism in the ‘African imagination’

Locating an emerging form

chapter 13|15 pages

‘I can’t go forward; I must go back’

Ben Okri’s (p)anachronistic utopias

part IV|2 pages

The World of and beyond Humans

part V|2 pages

Everyday Sociality

chapter 18|15 pages

Geopolitical and global topologies in fiction

Islam at the fault lines in Africa and the world

chapter 20|15 pages

‘Foundational fictions’

Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa’s early Anglophone-Igbo novels

chapter 21|16 pages

Drinking scenes

Alcohol in the Francophone African novel

part VI|2 pages

Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect

chapter 24|15 pages

Scattered testimony

Locating the Rwandan genocide in transnational witnessing

part VII|2 pages

Literary Networks

chapter 26|14 pages

The Story Club

African literary networks offline

chapter 27|14 pages

Language and prizes

Exploring literary and cultural boundaries

chapter 28|16 pages

Publishers’ networks and the making of African literature

Locating communities of readers and writers

chapter 29|14 pages

Literary networks in the Horn of Africa

Oromo and Amharic intellectual histories