Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think - Paperback

$63.00

Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think - Paperback

Name: Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780231220750
Price: 63.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Ainehi Edoro

$63.00

Book Overview

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.

ISBN	9780231220750
Author	Ainehi Edoro
Publisher	Columbia University Press
Genre	Literature
Format	Paperback
Published	January 2026
Language	ENG- English
Pages	304
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

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