Knighton Writing the Prison in African Literature

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78874-648-9
Verlag: Peter Lang
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 212 Seiten

Reihe: Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Knighton, Rachel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Afrikanische Literaturen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kriminalsoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

CONTENTS: «I was never one for writing diaries»: The Individual and the Collective in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981) – «We were all serving time»: Prison Memoir and Perspectival Variation in Ruth First’s 117 Days (1965) – «Language needs to be a part of resistance therapy»: Narrating Psychological Breakdown and Political Opposition in Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (1972) – «Moving the body means life»: Liberation and the Body in Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1986) – «[W]hat song shall I sing from this stench?»: Creating a Prison Poetics in Jack Mapanje’s And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (2011).

Über Autor(innen)

Rachel Anna Aisha Knighton completed her PhD in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, for which she was awarded a Graduate Research Scholarship by Girton College. Her PhD research forms the basis of this book.