Perceiving Pain in African Literature [Hardcover]

An analysis of literary accounts of suffering from sub-Saharan Africa, this book examines fiction and life-writing in English and French over the last forty years. Drawing on writers from the canonical to the less well-known, it uses close readings to examine the personal, social and political consequences of representing pain in literature.Acknowledgements Introduction: Pain, Literature and the Personal Painful Encounters in Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins Between Minds and Bodies  the Location of Pain and Racial Trauma in Works by Bessie Head and J.M. Coetzee Women's Pains and the Creation of Meaning in Francophone Narratives from West Africa Writing around Pain  Personal Testimonies from Rwanda by African Writers Responding to Pain, from Healing to Human Rights: Aminatta Forna, Antjie Krog and James Orbinski Epilogue: Literature and the Place of Pain Works Cited Index

A wide-ranging scrutiny of the ethics and aesthetics of representing pain in narrative, this thought-provoking study extends the geographical remit of trauma studies and the conceptual underpinnings of 'African literature'. Ranka Primorac, Lecturer, University of Southampton, UK

Zoe Norridge has given us an extraordinarily rich, insightful and often moving account of the depiction of pain in narratives by African writers, exploring literature's ability to do justice to the experience of suffering in ways not available to the social sciences. Constantly alert to the political, ethical and aesthetic questions that such writing raises, she traces the representation of pain as it occurs in fiction, testimony, memoir and literary journalism from a number of African countries, without shying away from hard questions about the role of literature in our dealings with pain and its consequences in the real world. Derek Attridge, Professor, University of York, UK

Perceiving Pain offers not only a detailed and thoughtful examination of the texts, but also of thlã&