African literature resources

Websites

Africa south of the Sahara

A good starting point maintained by Stanford University Libraries. There are useful pages such as African Literature and Writers on the Internet and South Africa: Literature that are well worth exploring.
The inbuilt search engine makes it easy to find a specific piece of information.

Electronic Journal of Africana Bibliography (EJAB)

A refereed online journal of bibliographies on any aspect of Africa, its peoples, their homes, cities, towns, districts, states, countries, regions, including social, economic,sustainable development, creative literature, the arts, and the Diaspora.

African Literature Association

Primary association for the study of African literature; publications, conferences etc.

Reference works

African writers

Use Black African literature in English, available in the Reference Collection. This is a useful tool for finding background information and identifying authors. For works on specific authors, type his or her name into the subject heading option in the catalogue. You will also find some books under the heading African literature or African literature (English)

 

 

South African writers

I recommend this very useful work in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Edited by Paul Scanlon, it has 460 pages covering all the major writers (André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadime Gordimer, for example) with illustrations and good bibliographies.
An excellent starting point for researching aspects of South African writing.
You'll find it in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection at call number 920 D548 volume 225.

To find critical works on South African literature in the Barr Smith Library, search the Library Catalogue under the Subject Headings South African literature (English)--History and criticism and South African literature (English)--20th century--History and criticism and the subheadings under both these Subject Headings.

Finding African literature in the Barr Smith Library

To shelve African (including South African) literature books and journals in the Library's collections we use the same Dewey classification numbers as the ones for English literature, 820-829, but to distinguish them we add an upper case letter S. [Following the same principle, we classify Australian literature at 820A - the Dewey number for English literature followed by the letter A].
We shelve these books immediately following the plain 820 to 829 numbers.

Here's an example: the Catalogue record for the book Essays on South African writing, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, gives its Location as in the Main collection at Call number 820.9S G981e.

Here's how you find books and journals with 820...S classification:

• start by locating the English literature sequence, 823-829, on Barr Smith Library Level 1 South
  [If you're not sure where to find those numbers, here's a map]



• go along the shelves until you come to books with Call Numbers starting with 829



• the very next books you see will have Call Numbers starting with 820A, which is the beginning of the Australian literature sequence



• keep going until you find 820P [Pacific Islands literature] and continue along the sequence



• next you'll strike gold!-- in front of you will be the 820S books and journals



• simply follow the sequence from 820S until you arrive at 820.9S G981e



• warning! if you get to 830 [German literature] you've gone too far; backtrack a little...

The Barr Smith Library has a good collection of the Heinemann African Writers series.

It's also worth rememembering that Flinders University library has a collection of literature in this field.

If you need help with African   literature resources, click the button

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This page is maintained by Jennifer Osborn