Achebe's Things Fall Apart - by Ode Ogede (Paperback)

About the Book

A Reader's Guide to one of the best known African novels, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Book Synopsis

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts.

Chinua Achebe's remarkable novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is probably the best known African novel and has become one of the world's most influential literary masterpieces. Since publication, a total of nearly 12 million copies have been sold, with translations into more than 50 languages. Despite its undoubted success, its apparent simplicity has tended to blind readers to the dazzling storytelling resources and the inventive language, plot, setting, and characterization which first draw them to the novel and keep them reading. This is the ideal guide to the text, setting Things Fall Apart in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, offering analyses of its themes, style and structure, providing exemplary close readings, presenting an up-to-date account of its critical reception and examining its afterlife in literature, film and popular culture. It includes points for discussion, suggestions for further study and an annotated guide to relevant reading.

Review Quotes

'Ode S. Ogede's book is one rare vehicle of refreshing advanced students' knowl-edge and introducing beginners to the main reading contentions of canonical texts beloved by schooling systems that provides, as they say in Nigeria, more than "how-for-do" information... This book offers a solid, advanced introduction to Achebe criticism. The bibliography is exhaustive. The coverage is comprehensive. The questions it raises should encourage advanced thinking about "Things Fall Apart".'--Sanford Lakoff

Ode Ogede's book is one rare vehicle of refreshing advanced students' knowledge and introducing beginners to the main reading contentions of canonical texts beloved by schooling systems that provides, as they say in Nigeria, more than "how-for-do" information. This guide ventures new insights about its subject and proposes new questions . . . it offers a solid, advanced introduction to Achebe criticism. The bibliography is exhaustive. The coverage is comprehensive. The questions it raises should encourage advanced thinking about Things Fall Apart.--Sanford Lakoff

About the Author

Ode Ogede is Professor of English at North Carolina Central University and past vice-president of the Modern Language Association of Nigeria. His publications include Achebe and the Politics of Representation and numerous essays on modern African fiction.