Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T22:57:35.516Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Bridging The Gap Between Ghanaian Elite And Popular Fictions: Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born And The Episteme Of Post-Independence Popular Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Amar Guendouzi*
Affiliation:
Mouloud Mammeri University, Algeria
Get access

Extract

If the recent research in African popular culture has succeeded in dismissing the traditional “binary paradigm” (Barber 1997, p. 2) that keeps compartmentalising the continent's culture into two strands, the literate/elite vs. the oral/traditional, and in asserting the domain of the popular productions as a “third space” of creative production, little has been done so far to study a possible artistic continuity between the genre of the popular and the other two genres. Indeed, while the interplay between traditional verbal arts and the modern development in the novel is extensively investigated by scholars and critics alike, little has been done until now to explore the interactions between popular and elite fictions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © African Research & Documentation 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achebe, C. 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. Essays. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Anorue, J. C. 2002 [1st pub. 1962]. “How to Become Rich & Avoid Poverty.” In Readings in African Popular Fiction, edited by Newell, S., 51-58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Armah, A. K. 1988 [1st pub. 1968]. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Oxford: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Armah, A. K. 1976. “Larsony, or Fiction as Criticism of Fiction.” Asemka 4:1-14.Google Scholar
Barber, K. 1997. Introduction to Readings in African Popular Culture, edited by Barber, K., 1-12. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Armah, A. K. 1987. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30 (3): 1-78. Accessed November 09,2011. http://wwwjstor.org/stable/524538.Google Scholar
Finnegan, R. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ikiddeh, I. 2002. “The Character of Popular Fiction in Ghana.” In Readings in African Popular Fiction, edited by S. Newell, 76-80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Larson, C. 1971. The Emergence of African Fiction. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lazarus, N. 1990. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindfors, B. 1997. African Textualities: Texts, Pretexts, and Contexts of African Literature. Asmara: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Newell, S. 2000. Ghanaian Popular Fictions: Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life & Other Tales. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Newell, S. 2002. “Introduction.” In Readings in African Popular Fiction, edited by Newell, S., 1-10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Nnolim, C. 1979. “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah.” African Literature Today 10: 207-223.Google Scholar
Obiechina, E. 1993. “Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel.” Research in African Literatures 24 (4): 123-140.Google Scholar
Priebe, R. 1986. “The Novel.” In European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa (Vol. 2), edited by Gerard, A. S., 827-843. Budapest: Akad miai Kida.Google Scholar
Priebe, R. 1997. “Popular Writing in Ghana: A Sociology & Rhetoric.” In Readings in African Popular Culture, edited by Barber, K., 81-91 [1st pub. 1978]. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Quayson, A. 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, W. 1996 [1st pub. 1806]. “Intimations of Immortality from the Recollection of Early Childhood.” In Selected Poems. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Wright, D. 1989. Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa: The Sources of his Fiction. London: Hans Zell Publishers.Google Scholar
Wright, D. 1992. “Introduction.” In Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, edited by Wright, D., 1-9. Library of Congress: Three Continents Press.Google Scholar
Wright, D. 1992. “Motivation and Motif: The Carrier Rite in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.” In Critical Perspectives on Ayi Kwei Armah, edited by Wright, D., 125-141. Library of Congress: Three Continents Press.Google Scholar

A correction has been issued for this article: