EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ON CHINUA ACHEBE, VOL. I

Chinua Achebe, a literary icon of the 20th century is widely regarded as Africa’s best novelist to date, and one of the world’s greatest. His narrative style and techniques have given rise to what has been characterized as the African art of the novel. It consists of ingenious indigenization and skillful manipulation of the English language to enable it to convey essential and intricate traditional African speech patterns and sensibilities. It also portrays an assertive African cultural voice telling African stories in an African manner.

OMENKA is the first of a two volume celebration of this modern African literary tradition which owes its origin to Achebe’s landmark classic novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which in over 55 languages and with more than 8 million copies in print, is the most widely read African novel, inside and outside the African continent. Some critical anthologies have been published on Achebe’s fiction at various stages of Achebe’s writing, but OMENKA is the first work of criticism in the 21st century which covers all of Chinua Achebe’s fictional writings up to the end of the 20th century. It is a compendium of 37 essays by eminent scholars from Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States. The essays provide global perspectives of Chinua Achebe as an artist with a proper sense of history and an imaginative writer with an inviolable sense of cultural mission and political commitment.