Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy by Neil te... - 9781107008670

Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of LiteracyReading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction\nAuthor(s): Neil ten Kortenaar\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781107008670, 978-1107008670\nSynopsis\nExamining images of literacy in African and West Indian novels, Neil ten Kortenaar looks at how postcolonial authors have thought about the act of writing itself. Writing arrived in many parts of Africa as part of colonization in the twentieth century, and with it a whole world of book-learning and paper-pushing; of school and bureaucracy; newspapers, textbooks and letters; candles, hurricane lamps and electricity; pens, paper, typewriters and printed type; and orthography developed for formerly oral languages. Writing only penetrated many layers of West Indian society in the same era. The range of writers is wide, and includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and V. S. Naipaul. The chapters rely on.