Nahem Yousaf

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing. Since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has been credited with being the key progenitor of an African literary tradition and his five novels read as tracing the national narrative of Nigeria. Achebe depicts precolonial societies disturbed by British colonization, in the 1890s and the 1930s, the dog days of colonization in the 1950s, Independence in 1960 and the onset of neo-colonial problems of corruption and civil war and, in his final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the pervasive sense of postcolonial disenchantment. This study casts back over Achebe’s writing career to assess his considerable contribution to postcolonial writing and criticism, including his Editorship of Heinemann’s acclaimed African Writers Series which has shaped African literature for international audiences since 1962. Yousaf’s examination of Achebe’s fiction is carefully counterpointed with detailed discussion of the Nigerian national situation and of Achebe’s essays and criticism – including his most recent and most autobiographical collection Home and Exile (2000) published in the year the writer celebrated his seventieth birthday.

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing. Since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has been credited with being the key progenitor of an African literary tradition and his five novels read as tracing the national narrative of Nigeria. Achebe depicts precolonial societies disturbed by British colonization, in the 1890s and the 1930s, the dog days of colonization in the 1950s, Independence in 1960 and the onset of neo-colonial problems of corruption and civil war and, in his final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the pervasive sense of postcolonial disenchantment. This study casts back over Achebe’s writing career to assess his considerable contribution to postcolonial writing and criticism, including his Editorship of Heinemann’s acclaimed African Writers Series which has shaped African literature for international audiences since 1962. Yousaf’s examination of Achebe’s fiction is carefully counterpointed with detailed discussion of the Nigerian national situation and of Achebe’s essays and criticism – including his most recent and most autobiographical collection Home and Exile (2000) published in the year the writer celebrated his seventieth birthday.

Part of a series which aims to give readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years. Karim Amir lives with his English mother and Indian father in the routine comfort of suburban London, enduring his teenage years with good humor, always on the lookout for adventure - and sexual possibilities. Life gets more interesting, however, when his father becomes the Buddha of Suburbia, beguiling a circle of would-be mystics. And when the Buddha falls in love with one of his disciples, the beautiful and brazen Eva, Karim is introduced to a world of renegade theater directors, punk rock stars, fancy parties, and all the sex a young man could desire. A love story for at least two generations, a high-spirited comedy of sexual manners and social turmoil, The Buddha of Suberbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years.

This New Casebook explores the enduring significance of George Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861). Eliot's radical cultural politics and the arrestingly original fictional strategies that characterise two of her most popular novels are explored from a variety of perspectives - feminist, historicist, structuralist and psychoanalytic.