Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- ARTICLES
- Gender Politics, Home & Nation in Zulu Sofola's King Emene:
- The Militant Writer in Sembène's Early Fiction:
- Psychological Violence in Bessie Head's
- Constructing the Destructive City:
- History, Progress & Prospects inthe Development of African Literature:
- Dispelling the Myth of the ‘Silent Woman’:
- Interrogating Dichotomies, Reconstructing Emancipation:
- Es'kia Mphahlele's Enduring Truth in Down Second Avenue
- A Tribute to Cyprian O.D. Ekwensi (26 September 1921–4 November 2007): The Writer, the Man & His Era
- REVIEWS
Dispelling the Myth of the ‘Silent Woman’:
The Nigerian Igbo Woman in Flora Nwapa's Efuru
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- ARTICLES
- Gender Politics, Home & Nation in Zulu Sofola's King Emene:
- The Militant Writer in Sembène's Early Fiction:
- Psychological Violence in Bessie Head's
- Constructing the Destructive City:
- History, Progress & Prospects inthe Development of African Literature:
- Dispelling the Myth of the ‘Silent Woman’:
- Interrogating Dichotomies, Reconstructing Emancipation:
- Es'kia Mphahlele's Enduring Truth in Down Second Avenue
- A Tribute to Cyprian O.D. Ekwensi (26 September 1921–4 November 2007): The Writer, the Man & His Era
- REVIEWS
Summary
Flora Nwapa's works mark the genesis of African women's novels. Her novel Efuru (1966) was foundational in expressing the emerging female voice in African Literature. As such, Nwapa's pioneering representation of female characters paved the way for reimaging women in industrious, independent and self-determined roles, a contrast from former depictions of inferior, subjugated and objectified women in African male writings such as the work of Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Elechi Amadi. This paper will analyse the genesis of Nigerian Igbo women's writings in the works of Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966), a foundational novel in the African and Igbo literary tradition as Nwapa was also the first published Igbo female writer.
The significance of Nwapa's place in African women's writing has not always been recognized. Critics such as Chimalum Nwankwo, Oladele Taiwo, Bernth Lindfors and J.I. Okonkwo criticized Nwapa's works as less mature, focusing frivolously on women's ‘small talk’. Bernth Lindfors describes Efuru as a novel focusing on
an Ibo woman in distress… Nwapa tells this melancholic story in a lifeless monotone that robs it of all life and color… When her characters do act, they say and do things of little importance. Every chapter is littered with trivia, the detritus of an inexperienced novelist.
(Lindfors 1967: 30-1)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reflections and Retrospectives in African Literature Today , pp. 108 - 121Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012