Product Description
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 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. 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.

The book is divided into eight parts. Part I consists of eleven essays which discuss authoritatively various aspects of Things Fall Apart, from innovative stylistics to intriguing feminism in the African context, and from cross-cultural dimensions to Igbo cosmology. The four essays in Part II focus on No Longer at Ease, highlighting with intense particularity the artistic and situational significance of this least studied of Achebe’s novels. Part III contains six essays on Arrow of God, ranging from discourse on the duality of the Chief Priest, Ezelu’s personality, to the tragic muse and cultural hero in the novel. There are four essays in Part IV. These examine the various facets of A Man of the People, from political symbolism to Igbo (African) leadership ideals. Part V focuses on Anthills of the Savannah and its five essays argue the woman question and the phenomenon of military dictatorships from intriguingly contrasting perspectives. Part VI consists of two eloquent essays on Achebe’s response to the Nigerian civil war in Girls at War and Other Stories and Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems. Part VII is devoted to the symbolism in Achebe’s short stories, using the "The Mad Man" for precise illustration. The book ends with Part VIII which has four essays focused on the versatile thematic dimensions and artistic dexterity in Achebe’s four books for younger readers. ... Read more

Product Description
Critical articles by South Asian scholars on Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist. ... Read more

Product Description
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. The oracle and the bull are synthesized, metamorphosed, laced, and condensed to form an alchemy which produces a cohesive communal community as the end result. This African rhetoric displays a language that is innocent, unlike the Western European rhetoric where language dramatizes multiple voices. This critical text focuses on Achebe's rhetoric from the Aristotelian style. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Africanness of the text.
The book captures the African rhetorical stance, and compares that with the Western European. Dr. Egar is so delicious to read, because he feels that language should be a site for social interaction. He also shows you how the African world view and the Western European seem to complement and yet explode each others ambiguities. I think because of the texture of his language, the book is most suited for graduate studies. ... Read more

Product Description
One of the most engaging, and unavoidable questions in the study of literature is the relationship between the events of an artist's life and his work. The author of this study contends that you cannot separate the two - she 'met' Achebe through Things Fall Apart. Knowing something of the biography of Achebe is crucial to gaining a more in-depth understanding of the man - and thus of the work. This authorised oral biography is compiled from interviews with family members, servants, and personal and professional friendships. It retraces the writer's steps from his hometown of Ogidi to Europe, and the U.S.; and considers his literary and political activities, his identities as an Africa, a Nigerian and an Igbo, and traits of his personality. The biographer recounts personal anecdotes in the biographer's exploration of a writer whom she characterises, on the one hand as a complex and conflicting personality; and on the other, as someone whose true concerm is for the well-being of the human community. The author is a Professor of English who has held posts at several North American and African universities; and has been a friend and colleague of Achebe's for some thirty years. ... Read more

Product Description
This critical study of the African writer, Chinua Achebe, has been revised and a new chapter added. Throughout there is an underlying concern with his system of values and its response to the turbulent history of modern Nigeria - colonialism, independence, political disillusionment and military rule. The study attempts to relate the novelist's career to the problematic role of the African writer, a role to which Achebe himself has contributed a great deal of thought in his various essays. The introduction presents the context in which he writes - in particular, the traditional ways of his own Igbo society, and the European contact with Africa. It is the complex and continuing interaction of these cultures that forms the central theme of most of his writings. ... Read more

Product Description
Taken together, Chinua Achebe's five novels--Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), A Man of the People (1966), Arrow of God (1967), and Anthills of the Savannah (1988)--encompass the entire social, historical, and political experiences of Nigeria, from precolonial times to the close of the 20th century. Central to these experiences is the clash of Igbo culture with the ways of the West. This book analyzes Achebe's use of oratory and rhetorical devices to educate his readers about the African colonial encounter and its aftermath and to delineate his characters. By examining the relationship of rhetoric and literature in Achebe's works, this volume sheds light on his use of the novel genre to persuade. ... Read more

Product Description
PRESENT STUDY EXAMINES ALL HIS NOVELS AS WORKS OF ART THAT GO BEYOND ARGUMENT AND PROPAGANDA ... Read more

Product Description
Power and responsibility as they affect political governance in Africa is the theme which is examined here in the works of the distinguished father of African literature. The author, a lecturer and literary critic of Commonwealth literature, identifies gross abuse of power and privilege as central to Achebe's fiction. He looks at Achebe's own view of the role of the African writer; the manifestation of abuse of power in his fiction; and his disillusionment with post-colonial irresponsibility in No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People. An analysis is also included of Achebe's short stories and poems of war. ... Read more

Product Description
'Achebe is the man who invented African literature because he was able to show, in the structure and language of Things Fall Apart, that the future of African writing did not lie in simple imitation of European forms but in the fusion of such forms with oral traditions', says Professor Simon Gikandi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This biography of Chinua Achebe captures how his personal characteristics have combined with historical events to produce the man who cleared the frontiers of literature for AfricaNorth America: Indiana U Press; Nigeria: HEBN ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Chinua Achebe Reading Anthills of the Savannah/ Arrow of God (excerpts)
Wonderful reading by Chinua Achebe. He transports you to a different time and place and makes you feel as if you are right there. This reading makes you wish all of his books could be available on tape!

This cassette is excerpts only
Very disappointing as we expected this to be a complete reading of Anthills of the Savannah and it is excerpts only! ... Read more