Signs of new features in the Swahili novel

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Periodical article

Title:	Signs of new features in the Swahili novel
Author:	Khamis, Said A.M.
Year:	2005
Periodical:	Research in African Literatures
Volume:	36
Issue:	1
Pages:	91-108
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Kenya Tanzania
Subjects:	literature Swahili
External link:	http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v036/36.1khamis.pdf
Abstract:	The burgeoning in East Africa of seven Swahili novels from the 1990s to date is an indication that a drastic socioeconomic and cultural change in a society may influence artists and impel them to innovate so as to subvert a mode that may have become inadequate in capturing the contemporary situation. This essay is about this change in the Swahili novel, which culminated in a kind of fiction that challenges the customary ontological boundaries of a hitherto broadly realist mainstream tradition. Furthermore, by means of textual evidence, the essay delves into societal factors to establish the fact that such a change can be seen in terms of a correlation between the intratextual and extratextual, with transformation in the inner textual structure being triggered by a 'totalizing' societal vicissitude as a result of a profound shift across a number of different spheres all having an impact on each other. Bibliogr., notes, sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]