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The writings of Ben Okri : transcending the local and the national
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ISBN: 9788190618335 Year: 2008 Publisher: New Delhi : Prestige Books,

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Fertile crossings : metamorphoses of genre in anglophone West African literature
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ISBN: 9042014784 9004486267 Year: 2002 Publisher: Amsterdam : Rodopi,

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Narrative shape-shifting : myth, humor, & history in the fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing & Yvonne Vera
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ISBN: 1282988190 9786612988196 1846157471 1847010121 Year: 2009 Publisher: Woodbridge, UK ; Rochester, NY : James Currey,

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Responding to many of the same neo-colonial concerns as earlier African writers, Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera bring contemporary, hybrid voices to their novels that explore spiritual, cultural and feminist solutions to Africa's complex post-independence dilemmas. Their work is informed by both African and western traditions, especially the influences of traditional oral storytelling and post-modern fictional experimentation. Yet each is unique: Ben Okri is a religious writer steeped in the metaphysical complexities of a traditional symbiosis of physical and spiritual co-existence; B. Kojo Laing's humor grounds itself in linguistic play and outrageous characterization; Yvonne Vera translates her eco-feminist hope in political and social transformation with a focus on the developing political actions of Zimbabwean women. All three reflect on the colonial and post-independence turmoil in their respective countries of birth - Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Together, they represent the evolution of a brilliant contemporary generation of post-independence voices. ARLENE A. ELDER is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of 'The Hindered Hand: Cultural Implications of Nineteenth-Century African-American Fiction' and has published essays and articles on African, African-American, Native-American and Australian Aboriginal literatures and orature.


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Ways of being free
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ISBN: 9401208093 9789401208093 904203534X 9789042035348 Year: 2012 Volume: 194 Publisher: Amsterdam Editions Rodopi B V

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Iconic migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential “nervous conditions,” caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, The English Patient , Midnight’s Children and The Famished Road , they respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages by dramatizing characters in traumatic struggles with belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism. The central characters, however, are driven by a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualism clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their singular selfhood and communal identity. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of “inoperative communities,” which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.


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Narrative shape-shifting
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ISBN: 9781847010124 9781846157479 Year: 2009 Publisher: Suffolk Boydell & Brewer


Book
Theory and literary creation
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Year: 2000 Publisher: Dijon : E.U.D. (Editions universitaires de Dijon),

The infinite longing for home
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ISBN: 9042016779 9401201498 1423789024 9781423789024 9789401201490 9789042016774 Year: 2005 Volume: 80 Publisher: Amsterdam New York Rodopi

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The Infinite Longing for Home is a groundbreaking study of Ben Okri's and K.S. Maniam's literary problematization of 'home' in relation to subjectivity and the nation within and beyond the context of Nigeria and Malaysia. Drawing on Lacan, Žižek, Laclau and Mouffe, and weaving through history, politics, philosophy and literature, this book critically examines the motives and means by which peoples forced to live together in a country love and hate each other, and overlook the truths about themselves, their actions and beliefs. It looks into why some embrace heterogeneity and open-endedness while others are internally compelled to over-identify passionately with their religion and race, and to posit theirs as irreducibly distinct from and superior to others'. The Infinite Longing for Home also traces through Okri's and Maniam's writings a way out of today's political aporia, a path to the re-creation of a new society humbled and unified by the recognition of its participation in flawed humanity.


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The storyworld accord
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ISBN: 9780803243989 0803243987 0803280785 9780803280786 9780803280762 0803280769 9780803280779 0803280777 Year: 2015 Publisher: Lincoln

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"Storyworlds," mental models of context and environment within which characters function, is a concept used to describe what happens in narrative. Narratologists agree that the concept of storyworlds best captures the ecology of narrative interpretation by allowing a fuller appreciation of the organization of both space and time, by recognizing reading as a process that encourages readers to compare the world of a text to other possible worlds, and by highlighting the power of narrative to immerse readers in new and unfamiliar environments.Focusing on the work of writers from Trinidad and Nigeria, such as Sam Selvon and Ben Okri, The Storyworld Accord investigates and compares the storyworlds of nonrealist and postmodern postcolonial texts to show how such narratives grapple with the often-collapsed concerns of subjectivity, representation, and environment, bringing together these narratological and ecocritical concerns via a mode that Erin James calls econarratology. Arguing that postcolonial ecocriticism, like ecocritical studies, has tended to neglect imaginative representations of the environment in postcolonial literatures, James suggests that readings of storyworlds in postcolonial texts helps narrative theorists and ecocritics better consider the ways in which culture, ideologies, and social and environmental issues are articulated in narrative forms and structures, while also helping postcolonial scholars more fully consider the environment alongside issues of political subjectivity and sovereignty.


Book
Magical realism in postcolonial British fiction : history, nation, and narration
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ISBN: 9783838207247 Year: 2015 Publisher: Stuttgart : Ibidem-Verlag,

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This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial anglophone fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie's Mignight's Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Marmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyse the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries -- Book jacket

Magical realism in West African fiction
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ISBN: 0415340616 0415182395 0415340616 9786610318995 0203451392 1280318996 0415245729 9780415245722 9780203451397 020375963X 9780203759639 6610318999 9780415340618 9780415182393 1134673787 Year: 1998 Volume: 1 Publisher: London New York Routledge

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This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe an

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