"The forest is a constant, if critically underrecognized, feature of African storytelling and literature. In African literature forests play a crucial role in the shaping of the African imagination and in novels by writers from across the continent and throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the forest has been used by authors to ask how worlds come into being, how collectivities take shape, and how these facets get incorporated into storytelling. Ainehi Edoro argues that the use of the forest by African novelists provides for a conception of the world, the individual, and the novel that is distinct from the West. In Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think Edoro's readings highlight how the formal evolution of the African novel can be observed by tracing the shift from the forest as a figure of violence in early twentieth-century writing to a site of utopian futures in 21st century speculative fiction. The book examines the recurrence of forest images in African fiction through a diverse range of authors, including indigenous texts; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Ben Okri's The Famished Road, and more recently Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon. These works, Edoro argues, are connected through their use of the forest to capture and critique the spatial dynamics of imperial power and the foundations of colonial occupation. In the final chapter, Edoro considers how twenty-first century fiction holds space for a different kind of novel that uses the forest to reveal the conditions for a utopian future in which the pressing issue of ecological violence against the earth and its non-human population is dismantled"-- Provided by publisher.