Chinua Achebe (Writers and their Work) - Softcover

Nahem Yousaf

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074630885X ISBN 13: 9780746308851

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing. Since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958, Chinua Achebe has been credited with being the key progenitor of an African literary tradition and his five novels read as tracing the national narrative of Nigeria. Achebe depicts precolonial societies disturbed by British colonization, in the 1890s and the 1930s, the dog days of colonization in the 1950s, Independence in 1960 and the onset of neo-colonial problems of corruption and civil war and, in his final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), the pervasive sense of postcolonial disenchantment. This study casts back over Achebe's writing career to assess his considerable contribution to postcolonial writing and criticism, including his Editorship of Heinemann's acclaimed African Writers Series which has shaped African literature for international audiences since 1962. Yousaf's examination of Achebe's fiction is carefully counterpointed with detailed discussion of the Nigerian national situation and of Achebe's essays and criticism - including his most recent and most autobiographical collection Home and Exile (2000) published in the year the writer celebrated his seventieth birthday.

About this title

Synopsis:

The publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958 brought world-wide attention to the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and established him as the pre-eminent African writer working in English. Achebe has been instrumental in bringing African literature to world attention through his fiction, his essays and his editorship. Over a long career Achebe has won many accolades and awards and his Anthills of the Savannah was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987. This book examines Chinua Achebe's novels but it also draws on his criticism, and locates his writing in terms of current developments in postcolonial theory. The unifying focus is Achebe's preoccupation with language, politics and power in pre- and post-independence Nigeria and his examination of the relationship between cultural identity and literary form. Exploring the opposition between the colonial and the postcolonial, the individual and the community, and tradition and modernity, Achebe makes a major contribution to our understanding of African life and literature.

About the Author:

Nahem Yousaf lectures in English and American literature with particular emphasis on postcolonial writing at Nottingham Trent University. His publications include Alex La Guma: Writing and Resistance (2001) and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (2002). He has edited Apartheid Narratives (2001) and various essay collection on British and American writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 074630885X
• ISBN 13: 9780746308851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 134