Reading Marechera

Considered one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers, the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Dambudzo Marechera is read today as a significant voice in contemporary world literature. Marechera wrote ceaselessly against the status quo, against unqualified ideas, against expectation. He was an intellectual outsider who found comfort only in the company of other free-thinking writers - Shelley, Bakhtin, Apuleius, Fanon, Dostoyevsky, Tutuola. It is this universe of literary thought that one can see written into the fiction of Marechera that this collection of essays sets out to interrogate.
In this important and timely contribution to African literary studies, Grant Hamilton has gathered together essays of world-renowned, established, and young academics from Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia in order to discuss the important literary and philosophical influences that course through Marechera's prose, poetry and drama. From classical allusion to the political philosophy of anarchism, this collection of new research on Marechera's work makes clear the extraordinary breadth and quality of thought that Marechera brought to his writing.