Isidore Okpewho – författare

Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. Translated into close to sixty languages, Things Fall Apart is the novel that inaugurated the long and continuing tradition of postcolonial inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the countries of the Third World that were once European colonies. This collection explores the artistic, multicultural, and global significance of Things Fall Apart from a variety of critical perspectives. The essays selected for this casebook represent the most important and well-established critical work written on the novel to date. This volume also contains an editor's introduction, an interview with Chinua Achebe, and suggestions for further reading.

Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. Translated into close to sixty languages, Things Fall Apart is the novel that inaugurated the long and continuing tradition of postcolonial inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the countries of the Third World that were once European colonies. This collection explores the artistic, multicultural, and global significance of Things Fall Apart from a variety of critical perspectives. The essays selected for this casebook represent the most important and well-established critical work written on the novel to date. This volume also contains an editor's introduction, an interview with Chinua Achebe, and suggestions for further reading.

". . . its pages come alive with wonderful illustrative material coupled with sensitve and insightful commentary." —Reviews in Anthropology" . . . the scope, breadth, and lucidity of this excellent study confirm that Okpewho is undoubtedly the most important authority writing on African oral literature right now . . . " —Research in African Literatures"Truly a tour de force of individual scholarship . . . " —World Literature Today" . . . excellent . . . " —African Affairs" . . . a thorough synthesis of the main issues of oral literature criticism, as well as a grounding in experienced fieldwork, a wide-ranging theoretical base, and a clarity of argument rare among academics." —Multicultural Review"This is a breathtakingly ambitious project . . . " —Harold Scheub" . . . a definitive accounting of the evidence of living oral traditions in Africa today. Professor Okpewho's authority as an expert in this important new field is unrivaled." —Gregory Nagy"Isidore Okpewho's African Oral Literature is a marvelous piece of scholarship and wide-ranging research. It presents the most comprehensive survey of the field of oral literature in Africa." —Emmanuel Obiechina" . . . a tour de force of scholarship in which Okpewho casts his net across the African continent, searching for its verbal forms through voluminous recent writings and presents African oral literature in a new voice, proclaiming the literariness of African folklore." —Dan Ben-Amos"This is an outstanding book by a scholar whose work has already influenced how African literature should be conceived. . . . Professor Okpewho is a scholar with a special talent to nurture scholarship in others. After this work, African literature will never be the same." —Mazisi KuneneIsidore Okpewho, for many years Professor of English at the University of Ibadan, is one of the handful of African scholars who has facilitated the growth of African oral literature to its status today as a literary enterprise concerned with the artistic foundations of human culture. This comprehensive critical work firmly establishes oral literature as a landmark of high artistic achievement and situates it within the broader framework of contemporary African culture.

The African Diaspora contributes to the debate between those who believe that the African origin of blacks in Western society is central to their identity and outlook and those who deny that proposition. Contributors include Niyi Afolabi, Adetayo Alabi, Celia M. Azevedo, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Eliana Guerreiro Ramos Bennett, LeGrace Benson, Ira Kincade Blake, Jack S. Blocker, Jr., Sharon Aneta Bryant, Michael J. C. Echeruo, Peter P. Ekeh, Patience Elabor-Idemudia, David Evans, Robert Elliot Fox, Andrea Frohne, Joseph E. Inikori, Joyce Ann Joyce, Joseph McLaren, Charles Martin, Ali A. Mazrui, Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure, Nkiru Nzegwu, Isidore Okpewho, Oyekan Owomoyela, Laura J. Pires-Hester, Richard Price, Sally Price, Jean Rahier, Sandra L. Richards, Elliott P. Skinner, Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Keith Q. Warner, Maureen Warner-Lewis, and Kimberly Welch.

The New York Times reports that since 1990 more Africans have voluntarily relocated to the United States and Canada than had been forcibly brought here before the slave trade ended in 1807. The key reason for these migrations has been the collapse of social, political, economic, and educational structures in their home countries, which has driven Africans to seek security and self-realization in the West. This lively and timely collection of essays takes a look at the new immigrant experience. It traces the immigrants' progress from expatriation to arrival and covers the successes as well as problems they have encountered as they establish their lives in a new country. The contributors, most immigrants themselves, use their firsthand experiences to add clarity, honesty, and sensitivity to their discussions of the new African diaspora.

In Africa the past and the present live very much side by side. African thinkers and intellectuals see their people's culture as rooted in time-honoured oral traditions and many African writers today use symbols, images and motifs from these traditions in their works. In this innovative study Dr Okpewho explores what he considers the essence of these traditions - myth - and examines its place in African life, literature and thought. Focusing on a number of tales from a selection of African countries, he shows myth to be the basic imaginative resource from which the larger cultural values derive. An established novelist as well as critic, Dr Okpewho discusses the narrative traditions of Africa - of which he continues to be a part - with balanced sympathy and objectivity. In this work he not only reasserts the pride in African traditions but also gives students of myth a fresh look at an old problem.