TY - BOOK AU - Rushton,Amy ED - SpringerLink (Online service) TI - Re-Reading Tragic Africa: Development, Neoliberalism and Contemporary Fiction T2 - New Comparisons in World Literature, SN - 9783031509551 AV - PN843-849 PY - 2024/// CY - Cham PB - Springer International Publishing, Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan KW - Literature KW - African literature KW - Comparative literature KW - Prose literature KW - World Literature KW - African Literature KW - Comparative Literature KW - Narrative Text and Prose N1 - 1. Introduction: The Danger of the Single Reading -- 2. Reading Africa in the Neoliberal World-System -- 3. The Longer Walk to Freedom: South African Prophecy and Neoliberal Intervention upon ‘Tragic Africa’ -- 4. ‘Africa awaits its creators’: Subverting Development Narratives -- 5. Back to Utopia: Retrieving the Past to Reclaim the Future -- 6. Conclusion: Towards a Kind of Paradise N2 - Grounded in world-systemic analysis, this book revisits the literary and social implications of ‘tragedy’ in relation to global narratives about Africa and within fiction by writers from the continent. It argues that working through the full complexity of ‘tragedy’ helps to identify and challenge plots that depict Africa as reaching a tragic impasse. Instead, reconsidering tragedy allows for further, related interventions including the implications of narratives of development, the argument for formally engaging with literary texts that present challenging material, reformulations of African political and cultural agency, and the possibilities to be found in utopian thinking. It claims that contemporary fiction helps to scrutinise the familiar big picture of Africa and create space for discussions about wider political and historical commonalities between the continent and the rest of the world. As such, the novels discussed in this study are not simply ‘about’ Africa: these fictional narratives position Africa as a central actor within the global history of late capitalism. Amy Rushton is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, UK. They have over a decade of teaching experience and have published numerous articles on African literature, neoliberalism, and contemporary cultural representations of mental distress. Amy is currently Chair of the Board for the National Survivor User Network (NSUN) UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50955-1 ER -