Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 29 May 2026
- 25 June 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009524483
- 9781009524469
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.728kg, 430 Pages
- Dimensions:
- Weight & Pages:
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Book description
Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context offers a compelling and comprehensive reading of the various contexts pivotal to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's practice as a writer. Ngugi drew a complex link between his role as a writer and the contexts within which his works are produced. The desire to come to terms with the past and the shifting historical process in his country is evident throughout his work. The volume shows that, for a writer whose work is steeped in biographical life experiences and historical events, context is even more special. It must be recovered through imagination and re-imagined as part of Ngugi's self-writing. One of the aims of this volume is to displace the notion of context as a reified site of retrieval and self-evident knowledge, and also to see how this sense of context offers readers of his vital writings new and disruptive ways of re-reading Ngugi's texts.
Reviews
‘The originality of this volume is that the articles do not start from the texts of Ngugi’s novels and plays but rather from the experience that made the writer, including the direct witnessing of national history, but also the local and familial context, and the intellectual influences. Centred on the man and the world that made him (a centre that moved as he did), the articles here bring a new perspective to the literary works. Critics of African literature too often assume we already know all that matters about the large-scale context of colonialism, postcolonialism and neocolonialism. But this volume, by examining how history touched the writer personally, at different ages and life stages, makes us understand all we thought we knew afresh, bringing valuable nuance, revelatory detail, and deeper understanding to the work of one of Africa’s greatest writers, one whose creative response to the world, in turn, has inspired readers in many places to understand the world differently and to want to change it.’
Neil ten Kortenaar - author of Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Authors Imagine the State at Independence
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