Tracing Personal Expansion: Reading Selected Novels as Modern African Bildungsroman (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780761834830)

How can Africans escape the control of the complex power relationships established during Colonization and successfully achieve self-development? More importantly, and the primary concern of this book, can African female characters ever hope to arrive at such individuation given the dual challenges of the power structures defined and enforced by European colonizers and the patriarchal structures that contort issues related to gender? Tracing Personal Expansion reads late 20th Century works by African female novelists Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Calixthe Beyala as modern Bildungsromane, novels of self-development, to reveal the dynamics, complexities, and challenges the characters and authors experience. By exploring the possibility of self-development in African female protagonists, this engrossing work augments existing feminist critiques that have analyzed the possibilities and potentials for the individuation of mostly Western, mostly European female characters.

Author: Walter P. Collins
ISBN-10: 0761834834
ISBN-13: 9780761834830
Publisher: University Press of America
Language: English
Published: 07/28/2006
Pages: 150
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.06w x 0.43d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2006 pg. 305