"Jackson’s lucid and stimulating book single-handedly opens up completely new sources to examine what the African novel does and how we might continue to productively read it. This accessible work provides an electric jolt to African literary studies."—Ato Quayson, Stanford University"The African Novel of Ideas combines erudition with logical precision to transform the relatively homogeneous body of ‘postcolonial’ fiction and theory into a constellation of arguments that think with and through African fiction and philosophy from a strategic selection of nations and regions. Rather than uneven development in Western terms, the result is a stunning picture of different kinds and angles of perspective on global Anglophone culture that scholars will have to reckon with for years to come."—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University"The African Novel of Ideas is generous and imaginative—Jackson shows, in one skillful reading after another, that narrative is one of the vehicles of philosophical reflection and intellectual innovation across the African continent. This unique book will help lead African studies and literary studies to a new place."—Imraan Coovadia, author of Tales of the Metric System"Here is the rare work of contemporary literary scholarship that speaks plainly to the question of what the novel can offer philosophy and vice versa. Jackson’s glosses of several recent African novels, particularly Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu, chart their metaphysical substance with an invigorating exactness."—Mark de Silva, author of Points of Attack"For too long, African writers have struggled against representations and analyses limiting their work to ethnography. This thorough and crucial intervention presents African literature, not merely as products of exotic traditions that titillate outsiders and Africanists, but as intellectual pursuits grounded in ideas. Accessible and rigorous, The African Novel of Ideas does great justice to the notion that African literature can distinctly represent both the thinker and abstract thought."—Elnathan John, author of Born on a Tuesday"Examining the artistic and intellectual output of five regions in Africa, this book is a much-needed redressing of the neglect of the African novel’s status as an artifact of philosophical inquiry. It challenges inherited means of reading the African writer, and offers a spirited alternative to the binaries that have come to dominate debates in postcolonial literature."—Masande Ntshanga, author of Triangulum