About this item
Highlights
- Winner--2022 College Language Association Book Prize Finalist--2024 African Literature Association's Best Scholarly Book Award Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe--author of Things Fall Apart, one of the towering works of twentieth-century fiction--is considered the father of modern African literature.
- About the Author: Christopher N. Okonkwo is Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbañje, the Born-to-Die, in African American Literature.
- 312 Pages
- Literary Criticism, African
Description
About the Book
"This is the first book-length comparative study of literary giants Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe"--Book Synopsis
Winner--2022 College Language Association Book Prize
Finalist--2024 African Literature Association's Best Scholarly Book Award
Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe--author of Things Fall Apart, one of the towering works of twentieth-century fiction--is considered the father of modern African literature. The equally revered Toni Morrison, author of masterworks such as Beloved and one of only four Americans to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in the past half-century, acknowledged African literature's and Achebe's influence on her own work. Until now, however, there has been no book that focuses on and critically explores the rich connections between these two writers.
In Kindred Spirits, Christopher Okonkwo offers the first comparative study of Morrison and Achebe. Surveying both writers' oeuvres, Okonkwo examines significant relations between Achebe's and Morrison's personal backgrounds, career histories, artistic visions, and life philosophies, finding in them striking parallels. He then pairs a trilogy of novels by each author: Achebe's Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God and Morrison's Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Okonkwo closely analyzes these two sequences--through what he theorizes as "villagism"--as century-spanning village literature that looks to the local to reveal the universal.
Review Quotes
[Kindred Spirits] further gives credence to the elasticity of the sociohistorical relevance of literature, thereby espousing how Achebe and Morrison are spontaneously engaged in black history undeterred by their differences in cultural and gender consciousness. Both writers rendezvous at the African village in writing about the collective traumas--colonization and slavery--of African and Africa-descended people. By and large, Kindred Spirits--a book of literary criticism on two canonically exceptional black writers, markedly juiced with a blend of history and real-life experiences--cannot but be the (black) reader's choice through and through.-- "Research in African Literatures"
Kindred Spirits is a timely and original, well-researched study of Chinua Achebe's and Toni Morrison's mutual admirations and influences. This is a welcome book in comparative literature and African diaspora studies that competently fills the 'Achebe gap' in Morrison and also the transatlantic gap in Achebe studies.
--Chielozona Eze, Northeastern Illinois University, author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are HumansAbout the Author
Christopher N. Okonkwo is Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbañje, the Born-to-Die, in African American Literature.