Author: Charles Cantalupo
Publisher: Africa World Press
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780865434592
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Inspired by the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this collection of twelve essays and two interviews surveys the wide variety of Ngugi's work from his earliest writings to his most recent - including essays, all his novels, and his writings for children. Also included are extensive discussions of Ngugi's writings in English and Gikuyu, his use of oral literary techniques, his tragic exile, and his revolutionary politics.
Author: Ruth Finnegan
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Published: 2012-09
Total Pages: 614
ISBN-13: 1906924708
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.
Author: Isidore Okpewho
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1992-09-22
Total Pages: 412
ISBN-13: 9780253207104
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →". . . its pages come alive with wonderful illustrative material coupled with sensitve and insightful commentary." —Reviews in Anthropology " . . . the scope, breadth, and lucidity of this excellent study confirm that Okpewho is undoubtedly the most important authority writing on African oral literature right now . . . " —Research in African Literatures "Truly a tour de force of individual scholarship . . . " —World Literature Today " . . . excellent . . . " —African Affairs " . . . a thorough synthesis of the main issues of oral literature criticism, as well as a grounding in experienced fieldwork, a wide-ranging theoretical base, and a clarity of argument rare among academics." —Multicultural Review "This is a breathtakingly ambitious project . . . " —Harold Scheub " . . . a definitive accounting of the evidence of living oral traditions in Africa today. Professor Okpewho's authority as an expert in this important new field is unrivaled." —Gregory Nagy "Isidore Okpewho's African Oral Literature is a marvelous piece of scholarship and wide-ranging research. It presents the most comprehensive survey of the field of oral literature in Africa." —Emmanuel Obiechina " . . . a tour de force of scholarship in which Okpewho casts his net across the African continent, searching for its verbal forms through voluminous recent writings and presents African oral literature in a new voice, proclaiming the literariness of African folklore." —Dan Ben-Amos "This is an outstanding book by a scholar whose work has already influenced how African literature should be conceived. . . . Professor Okpewho is a scholar with a special talent to nurture scholarship in others. After this work, African literature will never be the same." —Mazisi Kunene Isidore Okpewho, for many years Professor of English at the University of Ibadan, is one of the handful of African scholars who has facilitated the growth of African oral literature to its status today as a literary enterprise concerned with the artistic foundations of human culture. This comprehensive critical work firmly establishes oral literature as a landmark of high artistic achievement and situates it within the broader framework of contemporary African culture.
Author: Ruth Finnegan
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-05-16
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 1725239604
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This classic study is an introduction to "oral poetry," a broad subject which Ruth Finnegan interprets as ranging from American folksongs, Eskimo lyrics, and modern popular songs to medieval oral literature, the heroic poems of Homer, and recent epic compositions in Asia or the Pacific. The book employs a broad comparative perspective and considers oral poetry from Africa, Asia, and Oceania as well as Europe and America. The results of Finnegan's vast research illuminate and suggest fresh conclusions to many current controversies: the nature of oral tradition and oral composition; the notion of a special oral style; possible connection between types of poetry and types of society; the differences between oral and written communication; and the role of poets in non-literate societies. Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary scholarship, Oral Poetry attempts to create a greater appreciation of the literary aspects of this fascinating form of poetry. Finnegan quotes extensively from a wide variety of sources, mainly in translation. The discussion is presented in non-technical language and will be of interest not only to sociologists and social anthropologists, but also to all those interested in comparative literature and in folk poetry from cultures around the world. The re-issue of this text, widely used in folklore, anthropology, and comparative literature courses, comes at an appropriate juncture in interdisciplinary scholarship, which is witnessing the breakdown of traditional disciplinary boundaries and an increase in the comparative study of oral poetry. For this volume Ruth Finnegan has provided a new foreword relating the text to more recent developments.
Author: Jack Mapanje
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Jeff Opland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1983-12-30
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9780521241137
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book, first published in 1983, was the first detailed study of the Xhosa oral poetry tradition.
Author: Ruth H. Finnegan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 600
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book is based only on the more obvious sources and is intended as an introduction, not as a comprehensive account. Only some examples are given from a huge field and experts in particular areas will be able to point to exceptions and omissions. Some of the conclusions too may turn out to be controversial; indeed the author hopes to stimulate further publications and study. On each chapter and each section more research could take the subject much further. But in spite of these limitations, the general purpose of the book will be fulfilled to show that African oral literature is a subject worthy of study and interest, and to provoke further research in this fascinating but too often neglected field.
Author: Ce, Chin
Publisher: Handel Books
Published: 2015-09-04
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 9783603590
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study of oral tradition in African literature is borne from the awareness that African verbal arts still survive in works of discerning writers and in the conscious exploration of its tropes, perspectives, philosophy and consciousness, its complementary realism, and ontology, for the delineation of authentic African response to memory, history and other possible comparisons with modern existence such as witnessed in recent developments of the African novel. In this series we have strived to adopt innovative and multilayered perspectives on orality or indigeneity and its manifestations on contemporary African and new literatures. These studies use multi-faceted theories of orality which discuss and deconstruct notions of history, truth-claims and identity-making, not excluding gender and genealogy (cultural and biological) studies in African contexts.
Author: Ruth H. Finnegan
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Africa has long been known as the oral continent, at once the home of oral literature, orature and orality, the oral background to the postcolonial literatures of today, and the inspirer of the voiced traditions of the diaspora. But does this image of Africa and orality still stand up to scrutiny? In this new synthesis of her earlier and most recent work Ruth Finnegan illustrates the continuing interest of African verbal arts and performances and reflects on the related development of 'orality' studies through the decades since the 1960s. Her provocative conclusion is that it is time to abandon the long-entrenched image of Africa as 'the oral continent' and to adopt a more critical comparative perspective on 'the oral'. RUTH FINNEGAN, FBA is Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University and is the author of the classic study Oral Literature in Africa North America: University of Chicago Press; South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press