SOURCE: "The Influence of Folklore Techniques on the Form of the African Novel," in New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 583-605.

In the following excerpt, Dseagu explores the influence of folklore on areas such as plot structure and characterization in a number of African novels, including Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

Introduction

The African novel has been attracting attention among scholars and publishers only since the publication of Camara Laye's L'Enfant Noir and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart barely thirty years ago. In contrast with the long existence of the novel form in Europe and also with the long evolution of complex patterns of the novel form in Europe, the relatively new "emergence" of the form in Africa tended to create at about the time of L'Enfant Noir and Things Fall Apart the notion, first, that the novel form was new to the African continent and...