Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera - Softcover

Mkude, Daniel J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1779220049 ISBN 13: 9781779220042

Publisher: Weaver Press, 2003

Synopsis

Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signaled the presence of new and remarkable writing in Zimbabwe, and her four subsequent novels have confirmed her stature as one of the most important African novelists of the 1990s. Her art is alert to public life; and manifests the decisive moments of Zimbabwe's anticolonial resistance, the growth of the township culture and the competing demands of the city and the rural home. She records public experience through the consciousness of her female characters; but in prose as densely allusive as poetry, does not allow her style to register with a conventional realism, her characters always experiencing more than they understand, and seeing more than they and the reader may recognize. This work brings together critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, demonstrating through a diversity of approaches the complex beauty of Vera's work. It shows how Vera expanded the formal possibilities of the African novel by placing the experiences of women at the center of literature, and in so doing, retold and recreated Zimbabwe's history and imaginative life.

About this title

Review

an important, well-researched and thoughtful account of Vera's works by a group of critics from literary, historical, anthropological and political backgrounds...this dense collection of essays highlights the essential relationship between the African past, the period after independence and the plight of women in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. It is also an important contribution to the problematic interpretation of feminism in the African contexts of post-colonial literature. - Sekai Nzenza in ARAS Yvonne Vera has emerged as one of Zimbabwe's most prominent writers and Sign and Tabloo is a collection of essays that gives due recognition to Vera's literary significance. Its richly textured critical assessment of her achievements...will serve as a crucial focus for further studies of her writing... - Caroline Rooney in WASAFIRI ...critics, arguing from a feminist perspective, who see Vera as a pioneering writer, breaking the silence of traditional taboos and bearing witness in a newly created historical discourse. The essays, as a whole, demonstrate that Vera is worthy of this acclaim. The variety and quality of the essays in this well edited collection suggest that it will be the definitive work on Vera for some time. - Pauline Dodson-Katiyo in AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY 25

About the Author

Bernth Lindfors is Professor of English and African Literatures in the University of Texas at Austin

Edition details

• Publisher: Weaver Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1779220049
• ISBN 13: 9781779220042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Muponde Robert