Narrative Paths

<div>In <i>Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction</i> Kai Mikkonen argues that early twentieth-century European travel writing journal keeping and fiction converged and mutually influenced each other in ways that inform current debates about the fiction-nonfiction distinction. Turning to narratives set in sub-Saharan Africa Mikkonen identifies five main dimensions of interplay between fiction and nonfiction: the experiential frame of the journey the redefinition of the language and objective of description the shared cultural givens and colonial notions concerning sub-Saharan Africa the theme of narrativisation and the issue of virtual genres. <i>Narrative Paths</i> reveals the important role that travel played as a frame in these modernist fictions as well as the crucial ways that nonfiction travel narratives appropriated fictional strategies.<br>  <br> <i>Narrative Paths</i> contributes to debates in narratology and rhetorical narrative theory about the fiction-nonfiction distinction. With chapters on a wide range of modernist authors-from Pierre Loti André Gide Michel Leiris and Georges Simenon to Blaise Cendrars Louis-Ferdinand Céline Joseph Conrad Graham Greene Evelyn Waugh and Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)-Mikkonen's study also contributes to postcolonial approaches to these authors examining issues of representation narrative voice and authority in narratives about colonial Africa.</div>