The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866-2006)

This is the first book to analyse the Mozambican modern ghost story, establishing the genre's unique characteristics, situating it in a transnational context, and distinguishing it from other supernatural traditions. The study discusses why it emerged in different historical moments in Mozambican literature and how it was adapted in the process.

Relying on a combination of short and close readings, this book offers a large scope spanning almost two centuries. It examines works of prominent and less prominent Mozambican authors - including Campos de Oliveira, Orlando Mendes, Mia Couto, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and Paulina Chiziane - to discuss the relation of the Mozambican modern ghost story to colonial capitalism, the neoliberalism of the 1980s, and the globalization and world-literature debates of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

Auteur

Peter J. Maurits is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. His primary research interests are the way in which literary forms, and particularly genres, move through the world-literary system and change in the process. He has written about postcolonial Europe, the British and Mozambican modern ghost story, and futurism, and he is currently working on a book about African science fiction.