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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University Press
New Directions in African Fiction, by Derek Wright. Twayne's World Author Series 869. New York: Twayne, 1997. 206 pp.
Derek Wright has undertaken a risky enterprise--publishing two works on the same subject simultaneously. How can this be done without unnecessary repetition? Even though one work is an collection of essays by several scholars and the other a text exclusively of his own writings, the two volumes treat practically the same authors and works, from similar perspectives.
Thus "The Postcolonial Predicament, 1965-1970," which serves as chapter 1 to New Directions, reprises "Writers and Period" from Contemporary African Fiction. Chapter 4, "Orality and Dictatorship" in New Directions, which treats Ngugi and Farah, is a repeat of "Orature into Literature in Two African Novelists" from Contemporary African Fiction, also concerning Ngugi and Farah. The same is true for "Postmodernism as Realism" from Contemporary African Fiction, of which numerous elements can be found in "Imagined and Other Worlds," chapter 9 of New Directions. Most of the other works/writers analyzed by Wright in New Directions are given broad treatment in Contemporary African Fiction: J. M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Ben Okri, etc. Contemporary African Fiction and New Directions in African Fiction thus appear to be two sides of the same coin, so that reviewing one allows for critiquing the other.
Whatever the case, Contemporary African Fiction is an ambitious undertaking. The study aims at surveying the literary production of the 1980s at the continental level-excluding the Maghreb. In reality, the collection essentially limits its treatment to anglophone literature. Lusophony is absent and francophone writing is only represented through a sort of overview of the very controversial Calixthe Beyala. Despite the collection's title, the editor has understood the limits of his project: "the essays in this volume do not attempt comprehensive coverage of the fiction of the last twenty years or so,...
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