Havelock Ellis - "Essays in War Time"

Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson - "Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands"

George Adolphus Storey - "The Theory and Practice of Perspective"

Sewell Ford - "Torchy, Private Sec."

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.

The Great Amulet

M >> Maud Diver >> The Great Amulet




Then, very gently, she found her head lifted from its resting-place;
his eyes searching her own with an insistence not to be denied.

"Quita, you must have realised--all this before I started?"

"Yes."

"And you let me go without a word! By the Lord, I think I had the
right to know."

Her lips trembled a little at the reproach in his tone; but she did not
avert her eyes.

"Of course you had the right," she acknowledged with a flash of her old
frankness. "But things were going crooked just then. It all seemed so
strange, so difficult to speak of; and I thought if you were delayed it
would save you from anxiety, not to know. Besides--I confess I knew it
would mean . . . a great deal to you; and I wanted to win you all my
own self, before I told you. There! That's the whole truth. Can you
forgive me?"

"Forgive you, my darling? To-day of all days! I am at your feet."

She drew a deep breath. "That is quite wrong! But I can't pretend not
to be proud of it; though in theory I object to pedestals as much as
ever! And now----" she laid both hands upon him, her eyes full of
laughter and tenderness. "Now--don't you want to come and see--the
other woman?"

At that, his gravity went to pieces.

"Woman indeed! Bless her heart. Naturally I do. Hasn't she achieved
a name yet?"

"No, poor little heathen. I told her she must wait for you; though the
matter was settled long ago. What else could we call her--but Honor?
And I pray she may be worthy of the name. Both the Desmonds will stand
for her. I thought you would wish it; for, indeed, without their great
goodness to us both she might never have found her way into the world
at all! Now--come."

He raised her to her feet, and together they entered the room where, in
a railed cot, the unconscious herald of a larger joy, a more sacred
intimacy, lay sleeping:--a creature of flower-soft tints and curves,
who, in the sublime wisdom of babyhood, was concerned for nothing on
earth but her own inspired devices for self-development.

For long the two stood speechless before that astonishing, yet
inevitable, third; that miracle of incorporate self-expression, whereby
a man and woman behold their hidden spirits that have so passionately
clung together across the gateless barrier of individual being,
'visibly here commingled and made flesh.' Then Lenox put out a hand
and caressed the small soft head, reverently, cautiously, as if to
verify its actuality. At his touch the child stirred; the dark lashes
lifted; and in that instant of revealing, the truth came home to him
that, by his will, a living soul, a thing of mysterious and infinite
potentialities, had been added to the world's sum of life.

"See--she has your eyes," said Quita, tenderly triumphant; and for the
second time she looked into his own through a mist of tears. "My last
picture pleases you even better than the other one?" she added; and
stooping, he kissed her lips.

"It lifts you into a new kingdom, Quita; and doesn't he honestly seem
to you worth all the rest put together?"

"But yes, _mon ami_. She is my masterpiece--our masterpiece," she
answered very low.

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