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Forest Imaginaries - Ainehi Edoro

Forest Imaginaries

How African Novels Think

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
304 Seiten
2026
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-22075-0 (ISBN)
CHF 54,90 inkl. MwSt
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Ainehi Edoro is a Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the founding editor of Brittle Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture.

Acknowledgments
Prologue: How I Found the Forest
Introduction: Rethinking African Fiction from the Forest
1. Thinking Like a Forest: Fragmentation in African Storytelling
Part I. The Tragedy of the Forest
2. A Fairy Tale of Blood: Or Why Imperialism Is Always About Death
3. Chinua Achebe’s Evil Forest: A Critique of Literary Violence
Part II. The Love of the Forest
4. The Endless Forest in Amos Tutuola’s Spectacular Fiction
5. Nnedi Okorafor’s Aquatic Forest: Corals, Aliens, and Storytelling Beyond the Human
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Literatur Anthologien
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Natur / Technik Natur / Ökologie
Schulbuch / Wörterbuch Wörterbuch / Fremdsprachen
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10 0-231-22075-8 / 0231220758
ISBN-13 978-0-231-22075-0 / 9780231220750
Zustand Neuware
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