African women writers have come a long way from the sixties when they were hardly acknowledged or noticed as serious writers. In the past four decades, their works have been steadily rising in quantity and quality. Today these writers are redefining images of womanhood, providing new visions, and reshaping distorted characterizations and representations of African women in fiction. This rapid upsurge of writing by African women has been one of the most dynamic, phenomenal trends of African literature at the end of the twentieth century.

Contents: Editorial – Season of desert flowers: contemporary women’s poetry from Northern Nigeria by Aderemi Raji-Oyelade – To trans-emote a cosmos: Yvonne Vera’s holistic feminist vision in Butterfly Burning by Chimalum Nwankwo – Representations of the Womanist discourse in the short fiction of Akachi Ezeigbo & Chinwe Okechukwu by Ijeoma Nwajiaku – Calixthe Beyala rebels against female oppression by Tunde Fatunde – Ken Bugul’s Le Boabab Fou: a female’s story about a female body by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo – from liminality to centrality: Kekelwa Nyanya’s Hearthstones by Monica Bungaro – Submit or Kill yourself … your two choices: options for wives in African women’s fiction by Helen Cousins – Exile & identity in Buch Emecheta’s The New Tribe by Clement Abaziem Okafor – A failed sexual rebellion: the case of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa by Iniobong I. Uko – Space within & space without: a reading of Zaynab Alkali’s The Still Born by Hannah Ngozi Chukwu – To write beyond the fact: fictional revision in by Yvonne Vera & Lauretta Ncgobo of Southern African women in history by Margaret J. Daymond – Usurpation & the umbilical victim in Zulu Sofola’s King Emene by Azubuike Iloeje – Rage in the cage of a page: commitment of southern African women’s protest poetry by Simiyu Barasa – Eagles in the age of unacknowledged muse: Akachi Ezeigbo & Promise Okekwe by Femi Osofisan – reviews.

ABOUT THE EDITOR
ERNEST EMENYONU is chair of the department of African Studies at University of Michigan, Flint. He served as deputy vice-chancellor at University of Calabar, Nigeria, and also as provost of Alvan Ikoku College of Education in Owerri, Nigeria. He is the author of several works of criticism on African literature as well as of fiction including a collection of short stories and four children’s books.

CATEGORY
Literature/AFRICA