عنوان

Land, freedom and literature :

Number

TLets277580

Title Proper

Land, freedom and literature :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Maughan-Brown, D. A.

Title Proper by Another Author

history and ideology in the fiction about 'Mau Mau'

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Sussex

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

1983

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Sussex

Text preceding or following the note

1983

Text of Note

This thesis sees the literature about 'Mau Mau' as an ideal site for theexamination of certain socially significant modes of interaction between 'nonfictional'discourses ('history', autobiography, 'social psychology' etc.) andfictional discourses (both 'serious' and 'popular'). It seeks to demonstratesome of the ways in which realist fiction'can be made to 'render visible' itsconstitutive invisible: i.e. to reveal the historical determinations of theparticular configuration of (non-literary) ideological discourses which it'works' to produce the representatlonalillusion.Part I consists of an Introduction which outlines the theory of ideologyand the literary-critical theory informing the analYSis of the fiction. Thisis followed by an account of 'Mau Mau' as a historical phenomenon whichexamines available data relating to the 'causes' of the revolt, 'Mau Mau's'relationship to Kenya African Nationalism, the conduct of the campaign by bothsides, and the social composition of the movement, and concludes with anaccount of various historical interpretations of 'Mau'Mau'.Part 11 consists of three chapters: the fi'rst attempts to. construct ageneral model of Kenyan colonial settler ideology (defined as a special variantof fascism); the second situates the colonial novels about 'Mau Mau' by Ruark,Huxley, Harding, Kaye, Sheraton, Stoneham and Thomas in relation to 'public'and 'pseudo-academic' articulations of this ideology; the third discusses afurther group of novels -- by Cornish, Fazakerley, Target and Reid -- produced. in closer relationship with the dominant liberal ideology of the metropolisbut all informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the colonial mythology of'Mau Mau'.Part III opens with a discussion of the social, political and economicfactors determining the possible terrain of a 'new' dominant ideology appropriateto the neo-colonial conditions of post-Independence Kenya. There followsa chapter on novAls by Mwangi, Mangua and Wachira which are shown to have beenproduced within that dominant ideology and to have been significant attemptsto give it 'concrete' fictional development. The final chapter examines thechanging image of 'Mau Mau' in the fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, focusingparticular attention on A Grain of Wheat, which is seen as a 'crisis' textproduced at a moment of transition between mutually exclusive problematics, andthus as an ideal site for an examination of.the 'dialectically productive'relationship between fiction and ideology.

Literary fiction

Maughan-Brown, D. A.

University of Sussex

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y