Oral Literature in Africa
“Besides being a goldmine for scholars, Oral Literature in Africa is a delight for the general reader\u2026 The people and animals and spirits of Africa live, laugh, weep and quarrel between the covers of this book.” \u2014 Journal of African and Asian Studies
First published in 1970 by Oxford University Press, this classic study has been hailed as “the single most authoritative work on oral literature\u201d. It traces the history of story-telling in Africa, and brings to life the diverse forms of creativity across the African continent. Author Ruth Finnegan is thought to have \u201calmost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language\u201d with this book, and it continues to be a go-to text for anyone studying African culture.
However, despite its enormous scope and popularity, Finnegan\u2019s book is now out of print. It is particularly hard to find in Africa, where its original retail price was beyond the budget of most university libraries. The non-profit organization Open Book Publishers is endeavoring to make this definitive book freely available to African students and scholars \u2014 and indeed to any interested readers around the world. The Unglued Ebook will be particularly friendly to people in places with slow Internet connections: once a copy is downloaded, the book can be read offline.
This edition, developed in conjunction with Cambridge University\u2019s World Oral Literature Project, will include a new introduction and extra digital material. When Finnegan\u2019s book was first published forty years ago, the technology did not exist to include audio clips. Part of this Unglue campaign will involve the creation of a free online repository of Finnegan\u2019s audio recordings of African story-telling, carefully collected during her fieldwork in the late 1960s. A sample from this collection can be found here. It demonstrates the richness of the audio material that will be made available for the first time as part of this campaign. These clips, together with original photographs taken during her research, will be an invaluable resource to scholars of African literature and culture.” – unglue.it
Work
Licensing Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Connections
- Open Book Publishers
- unglue.it (host of)
Grouping Information
Versions
| Version | Format | Price | File | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Source (on Github) | — | Free | — | — |
| Buy a hardcopy | — | — | — | — |
| Hosted on unglue.it | — | — | — | — |