A Note on "Works Cited"

The history of publishing African fiction in English is particularly complicated. In many cases there are African Editions, American Editions, and English Editions, and publishers change series (and sometimes titles) in a fairly cavalier manner. Frequently this does not present a problem as all these editions have the same page numbers. But this is not always the situation. As editor I often had to make the arbitrary decision that the edition cited would be the one that I had most easily at hand. This sometimes coincided with the edition (and the page references) used by the contributors in their manuscripts, but often it did not. Therefore, where practical, in addition to the edition cited in the text, I have given as wide a range of editions as I have been able to track down through bibliographies and the entries in the data banks of OCLC. This is by no means complete, and since I have not seen all the editions myself, it does not preclude the possibility that some of them are "ghosts," but I trust that this information may prove useful in the absence in this special issue of a checklist of primary and secondary material.