| dc.description.abstract | This study examines the image of Africa in three creative works by Canadian novelist,
Margaret Laurence, namely The Prophet's Camel Bell, This Side Jordan, and The
Tomorrow - Tamer. Concerned that Laurence's critics have tended to ignore her work
that has African settings and African concerns while often over-reaching for her
Canadian fiction, this study sets out to not only examine the writer's images and
perception of Africa, but also to shed hitherto unshed critical light on the African
works. It attempts to bridge the critical gap that scholars have created between
Laurence's African and Canadian works.
Whereas many critics and reviewers have looked at Laurence's African works as
apprentice writing which paved way for her Canadian fiction, this study goes out to
acknowledge and explore the remarkable thematic and formal properties of these
works. We expose Laurence's African works as uniquely accomplished and fully
realized artistic pieces, which proclaim some of her most singular attributes as an artist.
The study shows that it is these works which, more than any other, attest to the
writer's ability to understand and sympathize with people across cultural boundaries, and affirm her humanism that transcends the insularity of race and region.
Laurence's African works are also examined against the background of the
contemporary tradition of Western writers who often denigrated Africans and
portrayed Africa as a place of gloom and despair. We endeavor to show that
Laurence's African works, in various ways, present a positive and optimistic image of
contemporary African society. In doing this, we also explore the writer's exposure and
condemnation of imperialism which she encountered during her sojourn in two African
countries, and which she represents in the works through various characters and
situations. Reflecting the works against the historical colonial context of their time, we
show that Laurence makes a significant departure from the popular Western
stereotypes towards Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. We show here how Laurence
eschews the racist denigration of Africans prevailing at her time, and how this makes
her works not only literary but also historical milestones.
In addition to the exposition on Laurence's image of Africa, this study explores the
personal and literary background of the writer and highlights, perhaps in a way that no
other research has done, how her African experiences shaped and informed her overall
outlook to life and literary vision.
We also examine the concerns and achievements of her vast literary work, in which the
writer emerges as a consummate artist and social commentator whose African and
Canadian works form a seamless, universal vision of the human struggle for freedom.
The study tries to place Africa in its due place as the germinal ground from which the
writer sharpened her creative skills and learned to probe the nature of human freedom.
The study is fully conscious of the interdependence between form and content in
literary art forms, and we therefore give as much attention to the works' relevance to
the life they portray as to their constructional elements. The imperatives of form and
issues of style which previous critics have raised on some of the works are addressed.
The study employs a method of deep textual analysis in order to achieve its objectives | en |
