Thresholds of change in African literature

African literature in the twentieth century has grown from the early poetry of Negritude to recent novels of magical realism. As novelists, poets, and playwrights testified to the unique qualities of their lives and societies, a new tradition began to emerge.

Novels of testimony, novels of revolt, novels of struggle, followed by postcolonial writings filled with complexities and ambiguities, have created a literary tradition expressive of the African spirit - a tradition influenced by earlier African oral literature, by European writings, by changing social conditions, and increasingly by Africa in writings themselves.

Thresholds of Change in African Literature is interested in the emergence of this tradition and particularly in the ways in which the emergent literature underwent change at each critical stage.

The dynamics of literary change are investigated, following the theoretical formulations of the Russian Formalists, Thomas Kuhn, and Jacques Derrida.

A model of African literature is elaborated, addressing first the critical issue of change itself: the ways change comes about in literature, especially in a body of works that belong to a common tradition; the ways texts represent the process of change and thus suggest models for their own relationships to other works; and the form African literature assumes as a written tradition emerges. The keys to the formation of that tradition lie in the thresholds of change.

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These thresholds are found in the works discussed in Thresholds of Change. Included are analyses of works by the first generation of novelists in the 1950s and early 1960s that form the literature of temoignage, a literature that bears witness to individual lives and to social, cultural, and historical realities.

There follows a study of the period from the 1960s to the 1990s that saw changes in the main trends, giving rise to new "literatures of revolt" and eventually to literatures expressive of postindependence contradictions and frustrations - "literatures of the oxymoron" or "postrevolt" writing.