Writing the prison in African literature / Rachel Knighton

Date :

Type : Livre / Book

Type : Thèse / Thesis

Langue / Language : anglais / English

ISBN : 978-1-78874-647-2

EAN : 9781788746472

Ngugi wa Thiong'o -- 1938-.... -- Critique et interprétation

First -- Ruth -- 1925-1982 -- Critique et interprétation

Soyinka -- Wole -- 1934-.... -- Critique et interprétation

Saʿdāwī -- Nawāl al- -- 1931-2021 -- Critique et interprétation

Mapanje -- Jack -- 1944-.... -- Critique et interprétation

Prisons -- Dans la littérature

Emprisonnement -- Dans la littérature

Prisonniers politiques -- Afrique

Collection : Race and resistance across borders in the long twentieth century / Oxford (GB) : Peter Lang , 2017-

Résumé / Abstract : This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960s onward due to their writing and political engagement, each writer's memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory. The book also illustrates the importance of these memoirs in the telling of their historical moment, from apartheid South Africa to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Malawi