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E-book Invoking Flora Nwapa : Nigerian women writers, femininity and spirituality in world literature

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Penilaian

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By invoking Flora Nwapa, this monograph draws attention to Nigerian women writers in world literature, with an emphasis on femininity and spirituality. Flora Nwapa’s Efuru was the first internationally published novel in English by a female African writer (Nwapa 1966). With the establishment of Tana Press in 1977, Flora Nwapa also became the first female publisher in Africa. Although Flora Nwapa has been recognized as the Mother of modern African literature, she is not sufficiently acknowl-edged in world literary canons or world literature studies, which is something this monograph aspires to redress, with the help of earlier studies, especially Nigerian scholarship. Structured around the Efuru@50 celebration in Nigeria in 2016, this book explores the revival of Flora Nwapa’s fame as the pioneer of African women’s literature. Using an ethnographic rather than bi-ographical approach, it captures Flora Nwapa’s literary practice in the context of the Nigerian literary scene and its interlinkages with world literature. The ethnographic portrayal of Flora Nwapa is complemented with an exposé of a select number of contem-porary Nigerian women writers, based on interviews carried out during fieldwork in Nigeria. Using a combination of anthropolog-ical, literary and African womanist theory, this book uses concepts like creolized aesthetics and womanist worldmaking to advance scholarly understandings of world literature, which is conceived here as a pluriverse of aesthetic worlds.This monograph aims to contribute to world literature stud-ies with an anthropological perspective that addresses some of the epistemological challenges of literary scholarship. Linked to growing scholarly interest in globalization, world literature studies tend to lean towards a sociological approach. Whether focusing on the global circulation of literature and translation (Damrosch), a literature-world of cultural capital and distinctions (Casanova) or world literature as analogous to the capitalist world system (Moretti), the emphasis has been on the production and circulation of literary objects in the context of global capitalism. More recently, world literature has even been conceptualized as a world-literature system, defined as the literature of the modern capitalist world system, with an emphasis on uneven and unequal development (WReC 2015). This materialist orientation has been challenged for its negligence of normative content and for conflat-ing the world with the globe, thus obscuring imaginary aspects of literature, especially literary worlding (Cheah 2008, 2014) and aesthetic worldmaking (Hayot 2011, 2012). Lately, world liter-ature scholars have suggested that the ‘recent turn towards the worlding capacities of literary texts’ brings forth the existential value of literature, especially in this age of crisis, when ‘we need to engage to our fullest capacity the imaginative resources of human culture’ (Helgesson and Rosendahl Thomsen 2020, 165–6).Conversely, this monograph contributes to the anthropology of world literature, which is an emerging field of study. In a re-cent discussion on literary anthropology, Wiles (2018) outlines three main branches: the use of literature as ethnography, the use of literary modes in writing ethnography, and anthropolog-ical studies of literary practice. While the first two branches have been explored and debated within the discipline, the anthropol-ogy of literary practice has been quite limited, mostly focusing on traditional or oral literary cultures and much less on contem-porary literary practices (Wiles 2018, 11). Although problems of representation have not always been considered when using literature as ethnography, literary modes of writing have been discussed in several anthologies (e.g. McGranahan 2020; Wulff 2016).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

960 UIM i

Penerbit

London : ., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

258 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789176351208

Klasifikasi

960

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

History of Africa

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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