African Literature, African Critics: The Forming of Critical Standards, 1947-1966

by David Rand Bishop

Overview

From a forest of controversies and opinions by African and non-African critics and writers, Bishop has been able to elicit strong paradigms of critical and theoretical evaluation of African literature by Africans themselves, and therein lies the abiding merit of this book. Modern Fiction Studies

The years immediately following World War II saw an extraordinary literary development in Black sub-Saharan Africa—the emergence of a virtually new literature. This phenomenon became the center of critical controversy as writers, commentators, and scholars attempted to forge a set of aesthetic standards for this new literature. Although the European contribution to this discussion is will known, the views of African critics, who have been writing voluminously on the subject since the 1940s, have been given far less attention. In this study, Bishop provides the first systematic examination of how Africans themselves have evaluated African literature in English and French from the early postwar years to the opening of the first World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313259180
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/22/1988
Series:	Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets , #11
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)
Lexile:	1420L (what's this?)

About the Author

RAND BISHOP is an Assocciate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Table of Contents

The Languages of African Literature
African Literature for Whom?
The Question of Audience
The Making of a Literary Tradition
Realisms, African Reality, and the African Past
African Literature, Literature Engagee
Negritude and the Critics
Bibliography
Index