Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration
Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration

Author: Thomas Jay Lynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-18

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 3319513311

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This book examines vital intersections of narration, linguistic innovation, and political insight that distinguish Chinua Achebe’s fiction as well as his non-fiction commentaries. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of these intersections: Achebe’s narrative response to Western authors who have written on Africa, his integration of Igbo folklore, the political implications of writing African literature in English, his use of Nigerian Pidgin, and the Nigerian Civil War. It also addresses the teaching of Achebe’s works. Achebe drew on diverse resources to offer searching psychological and political insights that contribute not only a decidedly African political viewpoint to the modern novel, but also a more inclusive narrative consciousness. Achebe’s adaptations of Igbo oral art are intrinsic to his writing’s political engagement because they assert the integrity and authority of the African voice in a global order defined by colonialism. This book reveals how his work has helped to restructure a global vision of Africa.

Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration
Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration

Author: Thomas Jay Lynn

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9783319513300

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This book examines vital intersections of narration, linguistic innovation, and political insight that distinguish Chinua Achebe’s fiction as well as his non-fiction commentaries. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of these intersections: Achebe’s narrative response to Western authors who have written on Africa, his integration of Igbo folklore, the political implications of writing African literature in English, his use of Nigerian Pidgin, and the Nigerian Civil War. It also addresses the teaching of Achebe’s works. Achebe drew on diverse resources to offer searching psychological and political insights that contribute not only a decidedly African political viewpoint to the modern novel, but also a more inclusive narrative consciousness. Achebe’s adaptations of Igbo oral art are intrinsic to his writing’s political engagement because they assert the integrity and authority of the African voice in a global order defined by colonialism. This book reveals how his work has helped to restructure a global vision of Africa.

Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1994-09-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0385474547

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“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13:

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An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebe's stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer's works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

A Man of the People
A Man of the People

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-09-30

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1101666390

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From the renowned author of The African Trilogy, a political satire about an unnamed African country navigating a path between violence and corruption As Minister for Culture, former school teacher M. A. Nanga is a man of the people, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. When Odili, an idealistic young teacher, visits his former instructor at the ministry, the division between them is vast. But in the eat-and-let-eat atmosphere, Odili's idealism soon collides with his lusts—and the two men's personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. When Odili launches a vicious campaign against his former mentor for the same seat in an election, their mutual animosity drives the country to revolution. Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria's first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of Achebe’s body of work.

Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative
Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative

Author: Ignasi Ribó

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2019-12-13

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1783748125

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This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them. This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism). This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others). Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.

There Was a Country
There Was a Country

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-10-11

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1101595981

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From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

Anthills of the Savannah
Anthills of the Savannah

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Heinemann

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780435905385

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Annotation Achebe writes of the old Africa and the new, tribal warfare and the war that goes on in people's hearts. His story takes place two years after a military coup in the mythical West African state of Kangan, and shows the transformation of a brilliant young.

Girls at War
Girls at War

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-02-22

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 0307816478

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Twelve stories by the internationally renowned novelist which recreate with energy and authenticity the major social and political issues that confront contemporary Africans on a daily basis.

Home and Exile
Home and Exile

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2000-07-27

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 9780199761081

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Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, the author of Things Fall Apart, the best known--and best selling--novel ever to come out of Africa. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in Home and Exile, Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. Here is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author--his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away. Home and Exile is a moving account of an exceptional life. Achebe reveals the inner workings of the human conscience through the predicament of Africa and his own intellectual life. It is a story of the triumph of mind, told in the words of one of this century's most gifted writers.