African Literature, African Critics: The Forming of Critical Standards, 1947-1966 (Great American Orators,)

The years immediately following World War II saw an extraordinary literary development in Black sub-Saharan Africa--the emergence of a virtually new literature. This phenomenon became the center of critical controversy as writers, commentators, and scholars attempted to forge a set of aesthetic standards for this new literature. Although the European contribution to this discussion is will known, the views of African critics, who have been writing voluminously on the subject since the 1940s, have been given far less attention. In this study, Bishop provides the first systematic examination of how Africans themselves have evaluated African literature in English and French from the early postwar years to the opening of the first World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966.David Rand Bishop is the author of 'African Literature, African Critics: The Forming of Critical Standards, 1947-1966 (Great American Orators,)', published 1988 under ISBN 9780313259180 and ISBN 0313259186.