Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart A Casebook

by Okpewho, Isidore

• ISBN13: 9780195147643
• ISBN10: 0195147642
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Isidore Okpewho is Professor of Africana Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at SUNY at Binghamton.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(52)
Isidore Okpewho
The African Writer and the English Language	55	(12)
Chinua Achebe
Igbo Cosmology and the Parameters of Individual Accomplishment in Things Fall Apart	67	(16)
Clement Okafor
Eternal Sacred Order versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart	83	(12)
Damian U. Opata
``When a Man Fails Alone'': A Man and His Chi in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart	95	(28)
Harold Scheub
How the Center Is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart	123	(24)
Neil Ten Kortenaar
The Metamorphosis of Piety in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart	147	(18)
Clayton G. Mackenzie
Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart	165	(16)
Rhonda Cobham
Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse	181	(20)
Biodun Jeyifo
Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart	201	(20)
Bu-Buakei Jabbi
Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It	221	(28)
Ato Quayson
An Interview with Chinua Achebe	249	(24)
Charles H. Rowell
Suggested Reading	273