Hans Christian Andersen - "O. T., A Danish Romance"

G. A. Henty - "With Buller in Natal"

Arthur Christopher Benson - "Joyous Gard"

Joseph Triemens - "The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Journeys to Bagdad

C >> Charles S. Brooks >> Journeys to Bagdad




Consider that the summer day has ended and that you are tired with its
rush and heat. Up you must climb to your house-roof. On the rim of the sky
is the blurred light from the steel furnaces at the city's edge and,
paneling this, stands a line of poplars stirring and sounding in the night
wind.

Alone upon the house-top to the North
I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky.

Is it fanciful to think that into the mind comes a little of the beauty of
the older world when roofs were flat and men meditated under the stars and
saw visions in the night?

Once upon a time I crossed the city of Nuremberg after dark; the market
cleared of all traces of its morning sale, the "Schoener Brunnen" at its
edge, the narrow defile leading to the citadel, the climb at the top. And
then I came to an open parade above the town--"except the Schlosskirche
Weathercock no biped stands so high." The night had swept away all details
of buildings. Nuremberg lay below like a dark etching, the centuries
folded and creased in its obscurities. Then from some gaunt tower came a
peal of bells, the hour maybe, and then an answering peal. "Thus stands
the night," they said; "thus stand the stars." I was in the presence of
Time and its black wings were brushing past me. What star was in the
ascendant, I knew not. And yet in me I felt a throb that came by blind,
circuitous ways from some far-off Chaldean temple, seven-storied in the
night. In me was the blood of the star-gazer, my emotions recalling the
rejected beliefs, the signs and wonders of the heavens. The waves of old
thought had but lately receded from the world; and I, but a chink and
hollow on the beach, had caught my drop of the ebbing ocean.

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