African Literature in Transition: Print Cultures and African Literature, 1860–1960 (African Literature in Transition)

By: Karin Barber and Stephanie Newell

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Synopsis: This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it explores their interactions as well as their divergent audiences. It is grounded in the material world of local presses, printers, publishers, writers and readers, but also traces wider networks of exchange as some texts travelled to distant places. African print culture is an emerging field of great vitality, and contributors to this volume are among those who have inspired its development. This volume moves the subject forward onto new ground, and invites literary scholars, historians and anthropologists to contribute to the on-going collaborative effort to explore it.