Books by PhD Alumni

Wosk also reveals the striking ability of artists to capture the drama and the dangers of the new technologies, seen in their images of factories spewing smoke, steam boilers bursting, trains crashing, and comic views of people-turned-automatons. Their art dramatically mirrored widespread feelings of disorientation the phenomenon sociologists have called “breaking frame.”

Wosk demonstrates the startling impact of new technologies on the decorative arts and industrial design. While critics anguished, manufacturers using new materials poured out elaborately ornamented machine-made copies of original works of art. The new simulations spurred dramatic design debates which have resurfaced during our postmodern era. She also highlights how artists’ responses to a world newly transformed by technology prefigured the fear and pride, resistance and accommodation to technological achievement, that are still felt over a century later.

In relating Atwood’s fragile, mysterious paintings, collages, linocuts, drawings, and cartoons to her writing, this study shows how such fairy-tale images-along with myths, the Bible, history, film, art, and popular literature-reveal archetypes in her work. The engaging writing and the eerie visual art of Margaret Atwood braid together fairy-tale themes from Grimm and Andersen with the feminist concerns for which this internationally acclaimed Canadian author is well known.

Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works is the first book to focus on the teaching of this writer’s oeuvre exclusively.

The focus of this study is upon a progressive women whose broad erudition allowed her to write on a great variety of subjects. Her own life as a revolutionist and writer, and her writings about women will interest those in women’s studies. As an Irish nationalist in a movement that had considerable influence on subsequent nationalist leaders like Arthur Griffin, her views in her revolutionary poems and articles are still pertinent.

Depictions of women as timid and fearful creatures baffled by machinery have alternated with images of them as being fully capable of technological mastery and control — and of lending sex appeal to machines as products. In Women and the Machine, historian Julie Wosk maps the contradictory ways in which women’s interactions with — and understanding of — machinery has been defined in Western visual culture since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on both visual and literary sources, Wosk illuminates popular gender stereotypes that have burdened women throughout modern history while underscoring their advances in what was long considered the domain of men. Illustrated with more than 150 images, Women and the Machine reveals women rejoicing in their new liberties and technical skill even as they confront society’s ambivalence about these developments, along with male fantasies and fears.

Atwood’s recent poetry and short fiction, especially experimental pieces, have been largely ignored. This collection explores Atwood’s new ways of presenting continuing themes, including survival. The issues of power and sexual politics that mark Atwood’s earliest work have evolved. Beginning in the eighties and nineties and now in the twenty-first century, Atwood’s characters and readers have become more aware of the multicultural, colonized, racist, and classist as well as patriarchal, sexist, and hypocritical nature of the worlds they occupy. Increasingly, Atwood’s survivors are trickster creators, using their verbal “magic” to transform their worlds. This new book contains new, never-published, groundbreaking essays on recent texts by many of the most well-known, Atwood and Canadian studies scholars, most of whom have written books on Margaret Atwood. Many of the essays consider the focus text in reference to all Atwood’s work.

The first group of essays addresses Benét’s life, times, and personal relationships. Thomas Carr Benét reminisces about his father in the first essay, and others consider Benét’s marriage to his wife Rosemary; Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder and Benét as friends, liberal humanists and public activists; and his friendships with Philip Barry, Jed Harris, and Thornton Wilder.The second group contains essays about Benét’s poetry, fiction, and drama. They discuss Benét’s role in the development of historical poetry in America, John Brown’s Body and the Civil War, Hawthorne, Benét and historical fiction, Benét’s Faustian America, the adaptation of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” to drama and then to film, Benét’s use of fantasy and science fiction, and Benét as a dramatist for stage, screen and radio.

Rhetoric here refers not to the classical arts of persuasion, or the verbal ornamentation of elite discourse, but rather to the ways that individuals and groups use language and writing to constitute their identities and their social worlds. The contributors, including some of the most productive scholars in research on rhetoric and composition studies, collectively explore the rhetorical character of popular culture and institutional discourse. This volume will appeal to researchers and teachers of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and education.

For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in postcolonial or African American literary studies to attempt to break down the boundaries that in recent years have come to isolate the two fields. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that raises one or more questions about the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker. Cautious not to conflate postcolonial and African American studies, Gruesser encourages critics to embrace the black Atlantic’s emphases on movement through space (routes rather than roots) and intercultural connections and to expand and where appropriate to emend Gilroy’s efforts to bridge the two fields.

In Gay TV and Straight America, Ron Becker draws on a wide range of political and cultural indicators to explain this sudden upsurge of gay material on prime-time network television. Bringing together analysis of relevant Supreme Court rulings, media coverage of gay rights battles, debates about multiculturalism, concerns over political correctness, and much more, Becker’s assessment helps us understand how and why televised gayness was constructed by a specific culture of tastemakers during the decade.On one hand the evidence points to network business strategies that embraced gay material as a valuable tool for targeting a quality audience of well-educated, upscale adults looking for something “edgy” to watch. But, Becker also argues that the increase of gay material in the public eye creates growing mainstream anxiety in reaction to the seemingly civil public conversation about equal rights.In today’s cultural climate where controversies rage over issues of gay marriage yet millions of viewers tune in weekly to programs like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, this book offers valuable insight to the complex condition of America’s sexual politics.

Konkle shows that Thornton Wilder, as a literary descendant of Edward Taylor, inherited the best of the Puritans’ worldview and drew upon those attributes of the Puritan tradition within American literature that would strike a fundamental chord with his American audience. By providing close readings of Wilder’s texts against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan culture and literature, Konkle demonstrates that Wilder’s aesthetic was not just generically allegorical but also typically American and his religious sensibility was not just generally Christian, but specifically Calvinist. He alsoemphasizes aspects of Puritan theology, ideology, and aesthetics that have been suppressed or repressed into our cultural unconscious but are manifested in Wilder’s texts in response to various historical or personal stimuli. Konkle makes an original contribution to Wilder scholarship by providing the first in-depth readings of the full-length play The Trumpet Shall Sound and of the film Shadow of a Doubt (as a major work of Wilder). Also included are readings of little-known and seldom-discussed dramatic pieces, including Proserpina and the Devil, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and Our Century. With its emphasis on the continuities of thought and form found in American literature from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, this analysis of Wilder’s drama and fiction will reclaim him as an intrinsically American writer, deserving to be read within the context of American literary and cultural traditions.

A more open architecture for writing programs emphasizes writing beyond the college curriculum not because Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) has failed but because it has succeeded: WAC must now take into account the inside and the outside, the classroom and the world.

The book will prove invaluable to writing and reading faculty in all settings, school and college administrators, students of composition/rhetoric and education, and organizers invested in the literacy of their communities.

Contents: Introduction. WRITING WITHIN, ACROSS, BEYOND. Plan of the Book. John Dewey and the Writing Program. Crowley’s Attack on Service and Temple’s Response. Situated Leadership and the New London Group. CONTINUITY AND CONTROL. An Overview of Regional Schools. First-Year GPA and Retention. Placement in Basic Writing. Visiting Schools. Two Schools. Conclusions. DEEP ALIGNMENT AND SPONSORSHIP. Vocation and its Discontents. Temple and Regional Community Colleges. Deep Alignment: Programs in Conversation. The First-Year Writing Assignment Project. What Does Sponsorship Tell Us About Alignment. ALINSKY’S REVEILLE. Saul Alinsky: A Community Organizing Model. The Open Door Collaborative. Literacy Sponsorship and Knowledge Activism. LUNCH. A Return to First Principles. Joint Sponsorship: What Grants Can Do to Breach the Walls. ON CIRCULATION. What Literacy Sponsorships Will Work Beyond the College Curriculum? How Do We Contribute to Our Home Institutions While Engaging Off-Campus Partners? Are These Efforts Worthwhile? Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

The Hmong have often been described as “preliterates,” “nonliterates,” or members of an “oral culture.” Although such terms are problematic, it is nevertheless true that the majority of Hmong did not read or write in any language when they arrived in the U.S. For this reason, the Hmong provide a unique opportunity to study the forces that influence the development of reading and writing abilities in cultures in which writing is not widespread and to do so within the context of the political, economic, religious, military, and migratory upheavals classified broadly as “globalization.”

Uncovering the connections and confrontations among three ethnic groups not often read in relation to one another, Kent maps out the historical contexts that have shaped ethnic American writing in the Modernist era, a period of radical dislocation from homelands and increased migration for these three ethnic groups. Rather than focus on the ways others have represented these groups, Kent restores the voices of these multicultural writers to the debate about what it means to be modern.

In this elegantly argued study, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller addresses this question, examining popular literary and cinematic culture from roughly 1880 to 1914 to shed light on an otherwise overlooked social and cultural type: the conspicuously glamorous New Woman criminal. In so doing, she breaks with the many Foucauldian studies of crime to emphasize the genuinely subversive aspects of these popular female figures. Drawing on a rich body of archival material, Miller argues that the New Woman Criminal exploited iconic elements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commodity culture, including cosmetics and clothing, to fashion an illicit identity that enabled her to subvert legal authority in both the public and the private spheres.

The research uses methods from conversation analysis with longitudinal data to document practices for interaction between learners and how those practices change over time. Language learning is seen in learners’ change in participation in their in social actions that occur around and within teacher-assigned language learning tasks (starting the task, non-elicited story tellings within tasks, and ending tasks). Web links are provided so the reader can see the data from the classroom that is the subject of the analyses.

In A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England, Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions within the literature as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability, aiding in the determination of class status and moral position. She reveals the way in which social identity and character are inextricably connected in Victorian ideology as seen through the ritual of tea.

Individual chapters examine the essential identities associated with particular domestic spaces, such as the dining room and masculinity, the drawing room and femininity, and the nursery and childhood. Autobiographical materials by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Linley and Marion Sambourne offer useful counterpoints to the evidence assembled from fiction, demonstrating how and where members of the middle classes remodelled the boundaries of social categories to suit their particular needs. Including analyses of both canonical and lesser-known Victorian authors, Architectural Identities connects the physical construction of the home with the symbolic construction of middle-class identities.

The book also includes a special session of the conference, a round-table conversation on Woolf’s legacy in and out of the academy. Beyond the volume’s focus on urban issues, many of the essays address the ethical and political implications of Woolf’s work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a “real world” social critic. The contributors, who include Ruth Gruber, Molly Hite, Mark Hussey, Tamar Katz, Eleanor McNees, Kathryn Simpson, and Rishona Zimring, advance Woolf studies and the broader fields of narrative studies, cultural geography, urban theory, phenomenology, and gender studies.

Rather than treating participants in L2 interactions as deficient speakers, the book begins with the assumption that those who interact using a second language possess interactional competencies. The studies set out to identify what these competencies are and how they change across time. By doing so, they address some of the difficult and yet unresolved issues that arise when it comes to comparing actions or practices across different moments in time.

On the one hand, they doubted the ‘naturalness’ of Victorian ideas about ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness,’ but on the other hand they understood the value of monogamy and marriage and the value of these institutions to what Freud called the ‘middle-class social order.’ This ambivalence was a primary source of the writers’ aesthetic strength; Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and others brought the paradoxes of modern intimacy to life, wrestling with them on the page. Combining literary criticism with forays into philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and the avant-garde art of Vienna, this volume offers a fresh account of the reciprocal relations between historical modernity and artistic modernism.

• Explores how development and conservation are related to complexity theory and the concepts of emergence.
• Frames a process in which change efforts can be taken to scale, both in scope of action and in rising sophistication.

In this book, Patrick Murphy takes an innovative approach, arguing that in order to understand the Riddles more fully, we must step back from the individual puzzles and consider the group in light of the textual and oral traditions from which they emerged. He offers fresh insights into the nature of the Exeter Riddles’ complexity, their intellectual foundations, and their lively use of metaphor.

While many studies of transfer are longitudinal, with data collected over several years, Nowacek’s is synchronous, a rich cross-section of the writing and classroom discussions produced by a team-taught learning community—three professors and eighteen students enrolled in a one-semester general education interdisciplinary humanities seminar that consisted of three linked courses in history, literature, and religious studies. With extensive field notes, carefully selected student and teacher self-reports in the form of interviews and focus groups, and thorough examinations of recorded classroom discussions, student papers with professor comments, and student notebooks, Nowacek presents a nuanced and engaging analysis that outlines how transfer is not simply a cognitive act but a rhetorical one that involves both seeing connections and presenting them to the instructors who are institutionally positioned to recognize and value them.

Considering the challenges facing instructors teaching for transfer and the transfer of writing-related knowledge, Nowacek develops and outlines a new theoretical framework and methodological model of transfer and illustrates the practical implications through case studies and other classroom examples. She proposes transfer is best understood as an act of recontextualization, and she builds on this premise throughout the book by drawing from previous work in cognitive psychology, activity theory, and rhetorical genre theory, as well as her own analyses of student work.

This focused examination complements existing longitudinal studies and will help readers better understand not only the opportunities and challenges confronting students as they work to become agents of integration but also the challenges facing instructors as they seek to support that student work.

By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of more supposedly exotic narratives, jain illuminates complexities of belonging that also reveal South Asians’ anxieties about belonging, (trans)nationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration. jain argues that these stories transform as well as reflect cultural processes, and she shows just how aspects of identity—gender, sexual, class, ethnic, national—are shaped by South Asians’ accommodation of and resistance to mainstream American culture.

Offering the worm as an archetypal figure to recast the evolution of a literary order alongside questions of taxonomy from 1740 to 1820 and on, Schwartz unearths Romanticism as a rich humus of natural historical investigation and literary creation.

Although the writers represent several different nationalities and racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, they employ a type of postcolonial literature that urges readers and societies beyond colonization. Wilson argues that the use of myths and fairy tales generally convey characters’ transformation from alienation and symbolic amputation to greater consciousness, community, and wholeness, and it is in and through story that characters construct a hybrid way of establishing themselves in the larger world.

As a writer who bridged the sciences and the humanities, Eiseley is a challenge for scholars locked into rigid disciplinary boundaries. Artifacts and Illuminations, the first full-length collection of critical essays on the writing of Eiseley, situates his work in the genres of creative nonfiction and nature writing. The contributing scholars apply a variety of critical approaches, including ecocriticism and place-oriented studies ranging across prairie, urban, and international contexts. Contributors explore such diverse topics as Eiseley’s use of anthropomorphism and Jungian concepts and examine how his work was informed by synecdoche. Long overdue, this collection demonstrates Eiseley’s continuing relevance as both a skilled literary craftsman and a profound thinker about the human place in the natural world.

Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City.

Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.

Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire at home (James Weldon Johnson, Sutton Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others), Gruesser examines U.S. black participation in, support for, and resistance to expansion. Race consistently trumped empire for African American writers, who adopted positions based on the effects they believed expansion would have on blacks at home. Given the complexity of the debates over empire and rapidity with which events in the Caribbean and the Pacific changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should come as no surprise that these authors often did not maintain fixed positions on imperialism. Their stances depended on several factors, including the foreign location, the presence or absence of African American soldiers within a particular text, the stage of the author’s career, and a given text’s relationship to specific generic and literary traditions. No matter what their disposition was toward imperialism, the fact of U.S. expansion allowed and in many cases compelled black writers to grapple with empire. They often used texts about expansion to address the situation facing blacks at home during a period in which their citizenship rights, and their very existence, were increasingly in jeopardy.

It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of “irony” inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.

In response, they purposely reduced the scale of print by appealing to a small, counter-cultural audience. “Slow print,” like “slow food” today, actively resisted industrial production and the commercialization of new domains of life. Drawing on under-studied periodicals and archives, this book uncovers a largely forgotten literary-political context. It looks at the extensive debate within the radical press over how to situate radical values within an evolving media ecology, debates that engaged some of the most famous writers of the era (William Morris and George Bernard Shaw), a host of lesser-known figures (theosophical socialist and birth control reformer Annie Besant, gay rights pioneer Edward Carpenter, and proto-modernist editor Alfred Orage), and countless anonymous others.

Literacy, Economy, and Power expands Brandt’s vision, exploring the relevance of her theoretical framework as it relates to literacy practices in a variety of current and historical contexts, as well as in literacy’s expanding and global future. Bringing together scholars from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, the book offers thirteen engrossing essays that extend and challenge Brandt’s commentary on the dynamics between literacy and power. The essays cover many topics, including the editor of the first Native American newspaper, the role of a native Hawaiian in bringing literacy to his home islands, the influence of convents and academies on nineteenth-century literacy, and the future of globalized digital literacies. Contributors include Julie Nelson Christoph, Ellen Cushman, Kim Donehower, Anne Ruggles Gere, Eli Goldblatt, Harvey J. Graff, Gail E. Hawisher, Bruce Horner, David A. Jolliffe, Rhea Estelle Lathan, Min-Zhan Lu, Robyn Lyons-Robinson, Carol Mattingly, Beverly J. Moss, Paul Prior, Cynthia L. Selfe, Michael W. Smith, and Morris Young. Literacy, Economy, and Power also features an introduction exploring the scholarly impact of Brandt’s work, written by Department alumni and editors John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold. An invaluable tool for literacy studies at the graduate or professional level, Literacy, Economy, and Power provides readers with a wide-ranging view of the work being done in literacy studies today and points to ways researchers might approach the study of literacy in the future.

The authors of these essays aim to contextualize Wilder’s work historically and to show that Wilder’s handling of questions of religion, American identity, gender, and ethics should vault him into the ranks of major American novelists. Specifically, this anthology includes groundbreaking work on the application of queer theory to Our Town; on Wilder’s screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt; and on Wilder’s adaptations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, and his own The Long Christmas Dinner.

It traces the roles that gender, race and empire have played in American detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe’s works through the myriad variations upon them published before 1920 to hard-boiled fiction (the origins of which derive in part from turn-of-the-20th-century notions about gender, race and nationality), and it concludes with a discussion of contemporary mystery series with inner-city settings that address black male and female heroism.

Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The ten essays in this volume engage legal, literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to investigate the role of punishment in Anglo-Saxon society. Three dominant themes emerge in the collection. First is the shift from a culture of retributive feud to a system of top-down punishment, in which penalties were imposed by an authority figure responsible for keeping the peace. Second is the use of spectacular punishment to enhance royal standing, as Anglo-Saxon kings sought to centralize and legitimize their power. Third is the intersection of secular punishment and penitential practice, as Christian authorities tempered penalties for material crime with concern for the souls of the condemned. Together, these studies demonstrate that in Anglo-Saxon England, capital and corporal punishments were considered necessary, legitimate, and righteous methods of social control.

Jay Paul Gates is Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in The City University of New York.

Maher’s Deep Map Country gives readers the first book-length study of the deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains region, featuring writers as diverse as Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, Loren Eiseley, Don Gayton, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, John Janovy Jr., John McPhee, Kathleen Norris, and Wallace Stegner. Deep Map Country examines the many layers of storytelling woven into their essays: the deep time of geology and evolutionary biology; the cultural history of indigenous and settlement communities; the personal stories of encounters with this expansive terrain; the political and industrial stories that have affected the original biome and Plains economies; and the spiritual dimensions of the physical environment that press on everyday realities.

In this selection of memoirs compiled by Mai Maddisson, UW alum Merike Tamm (M.A. ’69, Ph.D., ’76) recounts her experience as a child born in a refugee camp in Germany, to Estonian parents, in 1946. She arrived in the US with her family in 1951, and went on to write a dissertation on Jane Austen under the direction of Joe Wiesenfarth.

The Reformer John Calvin has influenced America in a formative way. Calvin remains respected as a theologian to whose work intellectuals on both the right and left appeal. In the nineteen-nineties, Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) formed a politically influential ecumenical coalition to oppose abortion and change the culture. Its ecumenism of the trenches influenced the administration of George W. Bush and continues to influence religious elements in the Tea Party. Evangelicals in the coalition presume to speak for Calvin. This book provides a counter argument.

Carl J. Rasmussen (PhD 1978) discusses Karl Barth’s interpretation of Calvin and its relevance for the church struggle against the Third Reich. Based on his analysis of Calvin, he provides a defense of gay marriage and the right to terminate a pregnancy, as well as an analysis of religious freedom. Calvin would reject ECT’s theology of virtue, conscience and natural law. But he would affirm its ecumenism as a possible path out of culture war.

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway’s Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy.

The collection addresses Hemingway’s many Italys—the terrain and people he encountered during his life and the country he transposed into his fiction. Contributors analyze Hemingway’s Italian works, including A Farewell to Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, lesser-known short stories, fables, and even a previously unpublished Hemingway sketch, “Torcello Piece.” The essays provide fresh insights on Hemingway’s Italian life, career, and imagination.

While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures.

This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.