DATTA, SREYA MALLIKA (2022) The critical inheritance of community in Nigerian literature: Tutuola, Achebe, Obioma, Atta. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
Abstract
This thesis is an invitation to reconsider community as a critical and shifting register of the African literary experience, focusing on its emergent and multivalent articulation in postcolonial Anglophone Nigerian literature from the 1950s to the present day. Examining the works of Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Chigozie Obioma, and Sefi Atta, the project draws attention to the ways in which the novel form has actively responded to, and participated in, the critical inheritance of community. The thesis locates itself at the heart of a debate that has been formative in the development of African cultural and literary productions; namely, the perceived rift between “tradition” and “modernity,” and the exemplification of this divide in the novel, the form of literary modernity. Discussions of community in African literature tend to position community, along with tradition, as that which is lost in the transition to modernity. One of the key interventions of the thesis is to show, in contrast, how community is, in fact, that which is critically produced in the processes of change. In brief, my thesis poses the following question: if the loss of community mediates the literary experience of modernity, how might the literary re-creation of community mediate alternative visions of modernity? Taking inspiration from the works of Raymond Williams and Emmanuel Eze, among others, the thesis argues that a dialectical approach identifies the pressure points at which newer ideas of community emerge that are auto-critical of community’s instrumental attachment to nostalgic or monolithic iterations. The thesis explores how the fictions in question instantiate such conceptual alternatives. Ultimately, an emphasis on the dialectical refuses false binaries and opens up interpretive avenues for African futures that are otherwise foreclosed by narratives of rupture and despair.
Metadata
Supervisors: | DURRANT, SAM |
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Keywords: | Africa, Nigeria, community, critical, Tutuola, Achebe, Obioma, Atta, modernity |
Awarding institution: | University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Dr SREYA MALLIKA DATTA |
Date Deposited: | 28 Jun 2022 12:59 |
Last Modified: | 28 Jun 2022 12:59 |
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