Product Description: Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures...read more

Product Description: This book analyzes how Francophone narratives written from the 1950s to the 1990s explore the struggle to craft decolonized forms of Islamic identity within sub-Saharan and North African societies. Considering major narratives by Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mariama Bâ, Assia Djebar, Rachid Boudjedra, Yambo Ouologuem, and Amadou Kourouma, Donald Wehrs highlights not only the writers' often sharply divergent attitudes toward Islam and varying assessments of possible relations between Islamic selfhood neither uncritical of Western modernity nor unreflectively hostile toward it...read more

Product Description: In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages...read more

Product Description: "Almost everyone in 20th-century literary studies will find this book valuable, as will most people interested in literary theory. It will be of particular interest to students of African and (more generally) Third World and postcolonial literature, to feminists of all stripes, and to those who are interested in philosophical approaches to literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)