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Full Description
Groundbreaking examination of literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century.
From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in 'British West Africa' carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing - from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters - and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as 'Onitsha market literature', and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships. She shows how local print cultures permeated African literary production, charting changes in literary tastes and transformations to genres and styles, as they absorbed elements of globally circulating English texts into formats for local consumption. Offering fresh trajectories for thinking about local and transnational African literary networks while remaining attuned to local textual cultures in contexts of colonial power relations, anticolonial nationalism, the Cold War and global circuits of cultural exchange, this important book reveals new insights into ephemeral literature as significant sites of literary production, and contributes to filling a gap in scholarship on colonial West Africa.
Winner: 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize
Contents
Introduction
1. Anglo-Scribes and Anglo-Literates in West African Newspaper History
2. The Time of Letters: Epistolarity and Nigerian Newsprint Cultures
3. 'Shameless Thefts' vs Local Literatures: Dusé Mohamed Ali's Comet
4. Onitsha Pamphlets: Youth Literature for the Modern World
5. The Work of Repetition in Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets
6. English Romantic Discourse: Women vs Men
7. Female Critical Communities in Nigerian Pamphlet Literature: 'Beware of Women'
8. Writing Time: African Cold War Aesthetics and Nigerian Political Dramas of the 1960s
9. Romances from the Nigerian Civil War: Veronica's End
Conclusion: Local Aesthetics
