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White on Black
John Cullen Gruesser
其他書名
Contemporary Literature about Africa
出版
University of Illinois Press
, 1992
主題
Literary Criticism / General
Literary Criticism / American / General
Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Culture, Race & Ethnicity
Social Science / General
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Social Science / Black Studies (Global)
ISBN
0252019164
9780252019166
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=9-5ZAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋
For white readers and writers, Africa was long the Dark Continent, land of Tarzan and of Kurtz. In White on Black, John Gruesser delineates shifts in the perception and portrayal of Africa over the past half-century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, three traditions of writing about Africa had been firmly established: the political assessment, the expatriate, and the fantasy traditions. Non-black fiction and travel writing about the continent since World War II comprises three generations that descend directly from these traditions and a fourth category that deliberately avoids them. After World War II, writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Saul Bellow largely ignored the political changes occurring in the twilight of colonialism. These authors exhibited little deviation from the traditions that reached their acme as much as 60 years earlier in the works of Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. By the 1970s, V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, and John Updike were more openly political than their predecessors, but their works for the most part represented adjustments to postcolonial conditions. Gruesser gives the first extended critical attention accorded in print to the work of writers of the 1980s, including J. G. Ballard, Maria Thomas, Helen Winternitz, and Jonathan Raban. These writers consciously acknowledged and actively worked to subvert established traditions. More recent novels by William Boyd, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Peter Dickinson, and William Duggan have gone further, focusing on the anomalies in the West's relationship with Africa and indicating an awareness that in order to render Africa more accurately, history itself must be rewritten.