This Third Edition of Approaches to the African Novel is a child of necessity. Because of the unfortunate death of the publisher of Saros International who issued the First Edition and high demand this third, enlarged edition has become imperative. Three new essays (all previously published) are added, two expectedly on Achebe (the father of the African novel) and one on Mongp Betiís Mission to Kala which was partially anthologised in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Volume 27, 1984). Achebeís Things Fall Apart as an Igbo national epic has evoked a spate of reactions from critics of African literature especially the troika Chinweizu et al. in Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. It was also anthologised in Modern Black Literature edited by S. Okechukwu Menu (1971). The essay on Arrow of God whose structure and meaning has been largely avoided by other critics is included here for further airing. For gender balance, as the previous volume contained no essays on women writers, an essay on Flora Nwapa has been added. Since the novels discussed in this volume exclusively are on the African literature south of the Sahara, the last essay on Peter Abrahams comes in to round out this collection of essays with a study of a south African writer, for geographical balance.

The novel remains the most popular genre in the African literary landscape. In the very large body of criticism that has been devoted to the craft of African fiction, this very stimulating study of six African novels will hold its own distinctive place for a long while. It brings to African critical thought not only an exceptional acumen of interpretation and analysis, but something much more important to most of the previous serious literary study than mere technical dissection - a keen sense of the experience and imaginative truth that make Asong's selected African texts living books as well as authentic record of human and moral values. Many of Asong's perceptions are not only critically shrewd but humanly searching, alert to aesthetic quality and invention. No one interested in creative criticism of African fiction will read this book without finding its approach a challenge to his or her own reading of African fiction, and a stimulus to understanding the growth and enduring richness of the best of the African novel. The book balances nicely in its choice of three texts in English and three in French, the two dominant colonial languages in Africa South of the Sahara. Even more interesting is the fact that although all the French texts have been translated into English, Asong opts to treat the three in the original language in which they were conceived and executed, a decision which keeps the reader as close as possible to the original idiom.

This book contributes to the growth of African Literature, particularly to the understanding of the writings of Chinua Achebe as an icon and one of the pioneers and prominent writers in African literature. It is a scholarly work that highlights lots of topical issues over the notion of genre in terms of literary theory and criticism of the African novel. Hence, it shows broadly how Achebe uses his culture or more relevantly his oral tradition to build a literary genre that is specific to him and to Africa in general. By evoking other critics and writers, this work focuses basically on Chinua Achebe's first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) and his latest one, Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Handled through a sober style, a stylistic approach and from a postcolonial perspective, it offers a broad reflection on how the African writer uses the oral tradition to rehabilitate history and to let the oral culture survive within the written one by means of the novel as an archaeological instrument that makes people hear the voice of African oral tradition in the novel with innovative strategies and methods of putting things together. In so-doing, this work studies the interconnectedness of orality and literacy and it demonstrates the way Achebe has artistically combined different traditions - one that is supposed to be borrowed from the West and another that is rooted in his own cultural environment - which he craftily blends to produce a particular "africanized genre" as he coins and develops the concept.In reading this work, any researcher will easily find its scholarly merit in the way it has been devoted to less developed phenomena (folklore/oral aesthetics) and controversies (colonial discourse versus the postcolonial one) in the African novel to draw attention to new trends, perspectives and give way to new stylistic, critical and literary approaches of the African novel.

The multitudinous nature of African literature has always been an issue but really not a problem, although its oral base has been used by expatriate critics to accuse African literature of thin plots, superficial characterisation, and narrative structures. African literature also, it is observed, is a mixed grill: it is oral; it is written in vernacular or tribal tongues; written in foreign tongues English, French, Portuguese and within the foreign language in which it is written, pidgin and creole further bend the already bent language giving African literature a further taint of linguistic impurity. African literature further suffers from the nature of its "newness" and this created problems for the critic. Because it is new, and because its critics are in simultaneous existence with its writers, we confront the problem of "instant analysis". Issues in African Literature continues the debate and tries to clarify contemporary burning issues in African literature, by focussing on particular areas where the debate has been most concerned or around which it has hovered and been persistent.