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Whither Nigerian Fiction? Into the Nineties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Derek Wright
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Extract

Adewale Maja-Pearce is an iconoclastic Nigerian critic who has dethroned a number of literary reputations, and his 1992 book, on Nigerian fiction of the 1980s, is only a few pages old when some venerated literary figures come into the sights of his polemic. Chief among these are Chinua Achebe and Elechi Amadi, whose early novels are seen to construct nostalgic traditional world-views on discredited superstitions and ‘degraded fetishism’. Maja-Pearce's real target in A Mask Dancing, however, is not the first wave of anglophone Nigerian novelists of the 1950s and early 1960s, but the writers of his own generation, and his concern is as much with the manner as with the matter of the writing.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 315 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Oddly, , Maja-Pearce fails to take issue with the bland allegorical conceptualisation of Iriyese as ‘life-force’ in Soyinka's earlier Season of Anomy (London, 1973), though, arguably, this is as artistically crude, in its way, as the other fantasy-ridden reductions of women dealt with in lesser novels like those of Eddie Iroh and Ernest Okolo.Google Scholar

2 Even a more complex writer like Iyayi, Festus, in The Contract (Harlow, 1982), fails to develop the full implications of the moral depth he has plumped.Google Scholar

3 Lawrence, D. H., ‘John Galsworthy’, in Beal, Anthony (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: selected literary criticism (London, 1967), p. 118, quoted by Maja-Pearce, p. 5.Google Scholar

4 West Africa (London), 15–21 02 1993, p. 247.Google Scholar

5 The Australian (Sydney), 9–10 11 1991.Google Scholar