Achebe, Chinua

In a study of multicultural literature, the dominance of ignorance and prejudice in propagating and perpetuating oppression and marginalization of others is all too common, as is the denial or suppression of the identity of decolonized peoples. We even see the rewriting of histo…

Sociolinguists often research the development of language attitudes and the state of language within speech communities. Individual speakers reflect the status of their L1 language in both speaking and writing (Wa Thiong'o 1986, Showalter 2001), and the idea that writing can be …

In this thesis I argue that the development of the Nigerian novel in the 1950's created an optimistic space within which writers were able to reassert repressed cultural identities, becoming significant participants in the effort to develop viable post-colonial cultural identiti…

This project fills several substantial lacunae in Achebe letters. First, it provides a chronological bibliography of the 1950-1975 Achebe corpus. This establishes for the first time a comprehensive and accurate illustration of the relationships among all published Achebe texts f…

Satire is a significant but largely untheorized mode of writing in post-colonial fiction. This study explores theoretical problems posed by satiric post-colonial novels and discusses the generic, representational, and political strategies of satire in texts by V. S. Naipaul, Chi…

This study examines the role of African novelists as major sources of historiography of Africa, and the socio-cultural experience of its people. Although many African novelists have over the years reflected issues of social and political significance in their works, only a few s…

Folk tales about tricksters (such as Ananse the spider in Africa and the Caribbean or Brer Rabbit in African American communities) play a dual cultural role analogous to the double role of medieval carnival. As safety valves for proscribed attitudes and impulses, both trickster …

This dissertation develops a theory of culture which addresses the role cognition plays in the construction and perpetuation of ideologies and the role ideologies play in the formation of national identities and literatures. Using the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson as a …

This dissertation seeks to avoid the common reading of postcolonial novels as embracing nationalism because they challenge empire. While recognizing that postcolonial novelists contest the imperialist construction of Africans and Asians as biologically, culturally, and intellect…

In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe articulates and dramatizes a unique and peculiar kind of rhetoric—a rhetoric that emphasizes that man, and not language, is the site for social interaction. He therefore, in some particular instances, domesticates the English language and make…

This study re-examines the significance and meaning of the period of“nationalist literature” in the two decades following World War II; it does so through a comparative exploration of the literature of three “postcolonial” regions of the former British Empire: Canada, the Caribb…

This study deals with the works of Achebe and Ngugi who use their literary works to reflect the history of their societies. Its core argument is that the writer's view of the world, however affected by the creative process, represents at one level a confrontation with the realit…

This study explores the interrelationship between rhetoric and literature as have manifested in Chinua Achebe's novels, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People, and Anthills of the Savannah. In these novels, Achebe has harnessed the power of orato…

The creative writer stands out in society as a central figure imbued with divine illumination. His priestly and prophetic roles, as well as his Promethean quest for freedom and justice, invest him with social responsibilities which, in turn, are closely defined in terms of redem…

This dissertation examines the novels of Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, and Nuruddin Farah, paying special attention to the relationship between language and nation, nation and race, as well as culture and language. The study explores how each of these contem…

Many critics consider nineteenth century British Romanticism one of the most political movements in literary history. A major reason for this claim is that the 19th century is recorded in European history as a watershed of economic, social, and political constructions whose cons…