Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels

Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels
Author: Amechi Nicholas Akwanya
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2024-04-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040017754

This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe’s novels in which they are read as works of literary art, as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction.

There Was a Country

There Was a Country
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101595981

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1994-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385474547

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

The Trouble with Nigeria

The Trouble with Nigeria
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Heinemann
Total Pages: 86
Release: 1984
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780435906986

This novel about Nigeria prophesied the 1983 coup.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2001-01
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9780141186887

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire in the harmattan. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. A classic in every sense, Chinua Achebe's stark, coolly ironic novel reshaped both Africa and world literature.

Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels

Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe's Novels
Author: Amechi Akwanya
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Achebe, Chinua
ISBN: 9781032748337

"This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe's novels in which they are read as works of literary art, as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction"--

Fictional Leaders

Fictional Leaders
Author: Jonathan Gosling
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2012-11-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137272759

Management theory is vague about the experience of leading. Success, power, achievement are discussed but less focus is given to negative experiences leaders faced such as loneliness or disappointment. This book addresses difficult-to-explore aspects of leadership through well-known works of literature drawing lessons from fictional leaders.

The African Trilogy

The African Trilogy
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2010-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307592707

Here, collected for the first time in Everyman’s Library, are the three internationally acclaimed classic novels that comprise what has come to be known as Chinua Achebe’s “African Trilogy”—with an intorduction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie . Beginning with the best-selling Things Fall Apart—on the heels of its fiftieth anniversary—The African Trilogy captures a society caught between its traditional roots and the demands of a rapidly changing world. Achebe’s most famous novel introduces us to Okonkwo, an important member of the Igbo people, who fails to adjust as his village is colonized by the British. In No Longer at Ease we meet his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, a young man who was sent to a university in England and has returned, only to clash with the ruling elite to which he now believes he belongs. Arrow of God tells the story of Ezuelu, the chief priest of several Nigerian villages, and his battle with Christian missionaries. In these masterful novels, Achebe brilliantly sets universal tales of personal and moral struggle in the context of the tragic drama of colonization.

Critiquing the Postcolonial Construct in Chinua Achebe’s Novels

Critiquing the Postcolonial Construct in Chinua Achebe’s Novels
Author: Ranjana Das Sarkhel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2018-11-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527522016

Chinua Achebe’s novels have always been read as texts from an erstwhile colonised African nation, interpreted within the parameters suggested by postcolonial theorists. The confines of postcolonial readings have raised questions about when the ‘postcolonial’ period would end, so that writers would no longer need to ‘write back’ to the empire or ‘rewrite’ their histories. This work explores how Achebe’s novels articulate his knowledge of his own people and the manner in which he participates in the politics of representation. He critiques the postcolonial methodology, and seeks out, recovers and provides an alternative narrative of the postcolonial experience and its aftermath, even as he seems to be moving beyond it. Achebe’s narratives do not conform to the postcolonial constructs of history as telling (rather than recalling) and of nations in terms of states (rather than people). Achebe combines the techniques available to historians (documentation) with those of novelists (the imaginative re-creation of events) for his fictional evocation of the past. He emphasises both the African artists’ role in helping to create a more egalitarian society and that of the act of storytelling as a shaping force in people’s lives. As he negotiates between his narrative form and realistic subject matter, Achebe puts forward a powerful critique of colonisation and its aftermath. Achebe represents a canonical voice in the emerging discourse of writers struggling to break free from the clichéd world of anti-imperialism and decolonisation.

Reading Chinua Achebe

Reading Chinua Achebe
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: James Currey
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1991
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN:

Analysis of the writings of Chinua Achebe aimed at students of literature. Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of [Achebe's] creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies of Achebe's writing. It comes at a good time. Achebe's literary reputation is equal to that of any living author and a substantial critical canon has been established. - G.D. Killam, Professor of English, University of Guelph Kenya: EAEP