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First published in 1973, this volume of the series includes a tribute from the Editor to the poet Christopher Okigbo who died fighting in the Biafran War in 1967, and two articles on his poetry. Also discussed are Leopold Senghor,Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, Lenrie Peters and Ferdinand Oyono. The contributions analyse East African poetry, French Algerian poetry, Zulu poetry, and "Rara" chants in Yoruba oral poetry. Donatus I. Nwoga writes a general article on modern African poetry. The new books...

Founded in the early thirteenth century, the Mali Empire stretched from the Atlantic coast of West Africa across the savannah lands to Timbuktu and Gao. Comprised of multiple ethnics groups-the Soninke, the Mandenka, Fula, Sosso, Tuareg, Sonrai, Almoravids-Mali was politically dominated by the Mandenka people who developed a comprehensive, eloquent, and ennobling historical tradition that has garnered international recognition and praise. Combining music, poetry, drama, storytelling, genealogy,...

This companion provides information on the lives and works of about 150 authors who write primarily in Arabic, covering the first known works of Arabic literature in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. to the present day. While concentrating on literary authors, writers from the fields of history, geography, and philosophy are also represented. The individuals represented were chosen primarily from the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Among the major authors are Najib Mahfuz, the 1988 Nobel laureat...

" . . . transcends the realm of literature and poetic criticism to include virtually every field of Arabic and Islamic studies." -Roger AllenThroughout the classical Arabic literary tradition, from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia until the end of the Golden Age in the 10th century, the courtly ode, or qasida, dominated other poetic forms. In The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy, Suzanne Stetkevych explores how this poetry relates to ceremony and political authority and how the classical Arabic ode...

This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmental...

Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing offers a new critical approach to E. M. Forster's legacy. It examines key themes in Forster's work (homosexuality, humanism, modernism, liberalism) and their relevance to post-imperial and postcolonial novels by important contemporary writers.

Poems and tales of a literary forefather of the United Arab Emirates Love, Death, Fame features the poetry of al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir, who has been embraced as the earliest poet in what would later become the United Arab Emirates. Although little is known about his life, he is the subject of a sizeable body of folk legend and is thought to have lived in the seventeenth century, in the area now called the Emirates. The tales included in Love, Death, Fame portray him as a witty, resourceful, scruffy p...

"A remarkable study, one that I recommend to any reader fascinated by the shaping of culture and the power of the psyche." - The Forward How typical of his generation was T.S. Eliot when he complained that Hitler made an intelligent anti-semitism impossible for a generation? In her new book, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women, novelist and critic, Andrea Freud Loewenstein examines the persistent anti-semitic tendencies in modernist, British intellectual culture. Pursuing her subject with lite...

This volume of essays, articles, addresses and interventions by the Nigerian poet, playwright and novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, contains work written over a period of some 25 years and includes much rare material. The introduction by Boidon Jeyifo sets the essays in the context of the development of Soyinka's work, thus providing a comprehensive insight into the intellectual background of his creative writing, and establishes the relation between Soyinka's ideas and...

Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest...

A new English translation of the celebrated Poem of the Cloak (Qasidat al-Burda) by Imam Busiri (may Allah be pleased with him) is now available. With calligraphy by Betul Krkan and illumination by Ersan Percem, the beautiful production of this edition reflects the esteem in which the poem is held, as well of course as its high purpose, the remembrance and honouring of God's Beloved and Final Messenger, Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.Sheikh Abdal Hakim's translation r...

In Islam the fascination for "the word" is as vigorous as in Judaism and in Christianity, but an extra dimension is, that the revealed text, the Koran, is considered to be verbatim the word of the Almighty Himself, thereby providing the Arabic language with just an extra quality. No wonder that throughout Islamic history the study of the word, the Koran, the prophet's utterances and the interpretation of both, has become the main axis of knowledge and education. As a consequence the intellectual...