Brave new world – a reading of the unbroken spirit and the verdict of death
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Date
2015
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Abstract
This is a stylistic analysis of two novels published in Africa in the twenty-first century. Fifty years ago, when the
publishing apparatus was controlled by the European colonial regime, an African writer not only had to have the creative
genius, but also the capacity to communicate the intended message in a language other than one’s own. Hundreds of
fictional works are now published in every major African capital in a variety of languages annually. The contemporary
African literary scene includes writers born in the 1980s and 1990s. These emerging writers had no direct personal
contact with colonisation. Since literature is a mirror of society, the realities contemporary African writers depict in their
writing cannot be the same as the ones depicted in African literature fifty years ago. The core of this paper is an analysis
of two texts produced by Africans in the twenty-first century: Wanjiru Waithaka’s The Unbroken Spirit and Onduko
bw’Atebe’s The Verdict of Death. References are made to earlier works of African literature for comparison purposes.
The said analysis of the two texts was carried out against the background of existing definitions of African Literature and
the pre-eminent postcolonial theory of literary criticism
Description
Research paper
Keywords
Literature, Kenyan, African, postcolonial, stylistic analysis
Citation
Pyrex Journal of English and Literature Vol 1 (2) pp. 006-011 October, 2015 http://www.pyrexjournals.org/pjel