African Literature in Transition : The Archive of African Literature, 1800–2000

Offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as a collective memory built over the years by generations of authors. It considers what African writers assume readers know and need to know, the shared sense of the past as it has shaped identity and space.

This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps that define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions that producers of texts must respond to: where stories are set, who writers write for, why writers write and how texts engage in meaning-making. It grapples with how writers imagine themselves contributing to a literary historiography and how readers get to understand the context within which texts are produced.