TY  - BOOK
AU  - Rachel Knighton
PY  - 2019
CY  - Oxford, United Kingdom
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 2297-2552
SN  - 9781788746489
TI  - Writing the Prison in African Literature
DO  - 10.3726/b14630
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057515
N2  - This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960s onward due to their writing and political engagement, each writer’s memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory. The book also illustrates the importance of these memoirs in the telling of their historical moment, from apartheid South Africa to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Malawi.
KW  - Writing the Prison in African Literature, prison, memoir, African writers, Africa, prison memoir
LA  - English
ER  -