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This book presents a contour of the literary theories and critical approaches in modern African drama. Theories are discussed against the backdrop of modern African drama and include Symbolism, Naturalism, Nativism, the quest for Indigenous Aesthetics, Oral Narratives, Narratology, Marxism, Cultural Materialism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Psycho-analytic criticism, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Feminism, Postcolonialism and Intertextuality. The objective is to offer researchers and scholars of modern African drama a comprehensive approach of the discipline of African drama from theoretical perspective. Critical debates on the possibility of reading African drama with the lenses of contemporary literary theories have been controversial among critics of African literature. Some critics have been asserting that African drama should be theory-free in its intellectual and scholarly interpretation. Others opine that modern African drama should be analyzed within the mainstream of African literature alongside the novel and poetry. This book seeks to revert these views by pointing out the importance of theories in the interpretation and understanding of African drama.
Updated and enlarged, this groundbreaking collection surveys the major critical currents and approaches in drama, theater, and performance
Distinguished scholars analyze the plays, poetry, and prose of Wole Smoyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. Essays trace his career and place his work in the general context of African literature.
The goal of this book is to initiate theoretical discussions on the popular subject of African literary language, and the thrust of the contribution, apart from theory-building, is the introduction of the Post-indiginist concept next to the well known essentialist and hybrid concepts. The study outlines a set of criteria for each aesthetic concept, so that literary analysis based on the criteria will verify whether or not they are adequate for understanding, explaining and describing African writers' language usage. It is expected that a language aesthetic theory in the African context may help in the study of individual writers' styles and equally address a neglect of descriptive studies in African literary scholarship.
The Black Arts Movement was sparked by the Civil Rights movement and the urge to produce and revitalize functional, realistic, and holistic symbols to express African American creativity. When Larry Neal began his quest for a new dramatic form to epitomize African American self-determination he laid the foundation upon which his friends and compatriots-Amiri Baraka and Charles Fuller-would build. Expressing their individual protests through their writings, these artists soon united in their attack against Eurocentrism, which traditionally minimized or neglected the roles played by Africans and African Americans on the world stage. Their writings signaled a radical change in the form and content of African American writing, particularly drama. In this insightful examination of African American cultural history, the author explores the heart of the dramatic imagination of African Americans during the turbulent years of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The analysis of the works of these three important dramatists reveals the roots of an Afrocentric approach to the theater, and introduces a new methodology for exploring Afrocentrism that is particularly suited to classes in African American drama and literature.ࠁ
Presents eight twentieth-century plays from seven African countries, along with explanatory notes and over thirty background writings and works of criticism.
This is the first anthology to bring together the key texts of African literary theory and criticism. Brings together key texts that are otherwise hard to locate Covers all genres and critical schools Provides the intellectual context for understanding African literature Facilitates the future development of African literary criticism
This book foregrounds some of the ways in which women playwrights from across a range of contexts and working in a variety of forms and styles are illuminating the contemporary world while also contributing to its reshaping as they reflect, rethink, and reimagine it through their work for the stage. The book is framed by a substantial introduction that sets forth the critical vision and structure of the book as a whole, and an afterword that points toward emerging currents in and expansions of the contemporary field of playwriting by women on the cusp of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Within this frame, the twenty-eight chapters that form the main body of the book, each focusing on a single play of critical significance, together constitute a multi-faceted, inevitably partial, yet nonetheless integral picture of the work of women playwrights since 2000 as they engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time. Some of these issues include the continuing oppression of and violence against women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and ethnic minorities; the ongoing processes of decolonization; the consequences of neoliberal capitalism; the devastation and enduring trauma of war; global migration and the refugee crisis; the turn to right-wing populism; and the impact of climate change, including environmental disaster and species extinction. The book is structured into seven sections: Replaying the Canon; Representing Histories; Staging Lives; Re-imagining Family; Navigating Communities; Articulating Intersections; and New World Order(s). These sections group clusters of plays according to the broad critical actions they perform or, in the case of the final section, the new world orders that they capture through their stagings of the seeming impasse of the politically and environmentally catastrophic global present moment. There are many other points of resonance among and across the plays, but this seven-part structure foregrounds the broader actions that drive the plays, both in the Aristotelian dramaturgical sense and in the larger sense of the critical interventions that the plays creatively enact. In this way, the seven-part structure establishes correspondences across the great diversity of dramatic material represented in the book while at the same time identifying key methods of critical approach and areas of focus that align the book’s contributors across this diversity. The structure of the book thus parallels what the playwrights themselves are doing, but also how the contributors are approaching their work. Plays featured in the book are from Canada, Australia, South Africa, the US, the UK, France, Argentina, New Zealand, Syria, Brazil, Italy, and Austria; the playwrights include Margaret Atwood, Leah Purcell, Yaël Farber, Paula Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, debbie tucker green, Lisa Loomer, Hélène Cixous, Anna Deavere Smith, Lola Arias, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Marie Clements, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Alia Bano, Holly Hughes, Whiti Hereaka, Julia Cho, Liwaa Yazji, Grace Passô, Dominique Morisseau, Emma Dante, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Lynn Nottage, Elfriede Jelinek, Caryl Churchill, Colleen Murphy, and Lucy Kirkwood. Encompassing several generations of playwrights and scholars, ranging from the most senior to mid-career to emerging voices, the book will be essential reading for established researchers, a valuable learning resource for students at all levels, and a useful and accessible guide for theatre practitioners and interested theatre-goers.
This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.