Ebook: Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is probably the most widely read of contemporary African writers, both on the African continent and abroad. His reputation was quickly established with his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which won him the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize as well as scholarships and grants. After the publication of his second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), he was awarded the Nigerian National Trophy for Literature, and for his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), he received the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award. His last novel, A Man of the People (1966), aroused immediate interest because of its seemingly prophetic insight into subsequent political events in Nigeria. In 1972 he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry prize for his volume entitled Beware, Soul Brother and Other Poems (enlarged, revised and republished as Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems in 1973). Over the last decade, Achebe’s lectures and essays have provoked much debate about the criteria for assessing African writers, and his influence on younger novelists has been considerable. His novels have been translated into some thirty languages, he has been awarded honorary doctorates by universities in North America and Britain, he has been elected an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association, has in recent years been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, and of course, has been the subject of numerous critical essays published in journals throughout the world. It seems timely,therefore,to bring together the best and most illuminating of these articles so that interested readers, students and teachers might have easy access to them and become aware of the variety of perspectives and approaches that critics have brought to Achebe’s works.