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This study offers a literary history of the war novel in Africa. Coundouriotis argues that this genre, aimed more specifically at African readers than the continent’s better-known bildungsroman tradition, nevertheless makes an important intervention in global understandings of human rights.
The African war novel lies at the convergence of two sensibilities it encounters in European traditions: the naturalist aesthetic and the discourse of humanitarianism, whether in the form of sentimentalism or of human rights law. Both these sensibilities are present in culturally hybrid forms in the African war novel, reflecting its syncretism as a narrative practice engaged with the colonial and postcolonial history of the continent.
The war novel, Coundouriotis argues, stakes claims to collective rights that contrast with the individualism of the bildungsroman tradition. The genre is a form of people’s history that participates in a political struggle for the rights of the dispossessed.
In powerful readings of a vast literature of war in Africa, with impeccable scholarship and painstaking attention to historical detail, Eleni Coundouriotis has reconstructed a history of the African novel from below, a history that puts "the people" and their political and literary claims of rights to representation--both in the postcolonial state and its national literature--at the center of the story. The book adds vital new perspectives on the interdependent developments of humanitarian thinking and Naturalism, adding necessary nuance to our understanding of the relationships among literature, human rights, and humanitarianism.---—Joseph R. Slaughter, Columbia University
Eleni Coundouriotis’s latest book so exudes theoretical newness that one reads even the bibliography with pencil at the ready.
“The People’s Right to the Novel combines a clear thesis with a painstaking and perceptive discussion of the individual authors and their works.”---—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University