Obumselu on African Literature: The Intellectual Muse

This compendium brings together, in one volume for the first time, Obumselu’s highly celebrated work on African literature. With the dialectic of cultures as the presiding preoccupation of his work, and appraising the place of African literature in the universal scheme of cultural interchange his critical speciality, Obumselu espoused a scholarship with a necessarily indispensable comparative dimension, as the articles anthologised in this volume as African literature reveal. The expertise with which he explores the oeuvres of many Western writers because of the light they shed on the creative endeavours of African writers is offset only by the rigour with which he explores the transformative impact of indigenous African literature on the craft of many distinguished African writers. Obumselu’s discovery of a tradition of the African novel almost entirely rooted in the poetics of African folklore, which began with Mofolo and Plaatje and blossomed in Camara Laye and Ben Okri, is a highlight of his incisive scholarship and reverberates through many of the works here. The originality of his insights, his analytic rigour, the catholicity of his tastes and competences, and the power and grace of his expression make this volume compelling.