Narrative Paths African Travel In Modern Fiction And Nonfiction [Paperback]

InNarrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction, Kai Mikkonen argues that early twentieth-century European travel writing, journal keeping, and fiction converged and mutually influenced each other in ways that inform current debates about the fictionnonfiction distinction. Turning to narratives set in sub-Saharan Africa, Mikkonen identifies five main dimensions of interplay between fiction and nonfiction: the experiential frame of the journey, the redefinition of the language and objective of description, the shared cultural givens and colonial notions concerning sub-Saharan Africa, the theme of narrativisation, and the issue of virtual genres.Narrative Pathsreveals the important role that travel played as a frame in these modernist fictions as well as the crucial ways that nonfiction travel narratives appropriated fictional strategies.
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Narrative Pathscontributes to debates in narratology and rhetorical narrative theory about the fictionnonfiction distinction. With chapters on a wide range of modernist authorsfrom Pierre Loti, Andr? Gide, Michel Leiris, and Georges Simenon to Blaise Cendrars, Louis-Ferdinand C?line, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)Mikkonens study also contributes to postcolonial approaches to these authors, examining issues of representation, narrative voice, and authority in narratives about colonial Africa.

“There is much to admire in Kai Mikkonen’s extended analysis of the travel writing and fiction of Loti, Céline, Gide, Leiris, Simenon, Cendrars, Conrad, Greene, Waugh, and Blixen.Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfictionmakes a valuable contribution to an often neglected but quite appealing genre by demonstrating that travel narrative appropriates devices from fiction to portray ambiguity of voice and perspective. The insights on the interconnectedness between an author’s travel wrlã¾