This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps that define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions that producers of texts must respond to: where stories are set, who writers write for, why writers write and how texts engage in meaning-making. It grapples with how writers imagine themselves contributing to a literary historiography and how readers get to understand the context within which texts are produced.

A genre that glorifies brutish masculinity and late Victorian imperialism, boys' 'lost world' adventure fiction has traditionally been studied for its politically problematic content. While attuned to these concerns, this Element approaches the genre from a different angle, viewing adventure fiction as not just a catalogue of texts but a corpus of books. Examining early editions of Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, and The Lost World, the Element argues that fin-de-siècle adventure fiction sought to resist the nineteenth-century industrialisation of book production from within. As the Element points out, the genre is filled with nostalgic simulations of material anachronisms – 'facsimiles' of fictional pre-modern paper, printing, and handwriting that re-humanise the otherwise alienating landscape of the modern book and modern literary production. The Element ends by exploring a subversive revival of lost world adventure fiction that emerged in response to ebooks at the beginning of the twenty-first century.