Chinua achebe, robert penn warren, joseph conrad and henrik ibsen : literary affinities and influences

Abstract

The following dissertation is a comparison of one of the most outstanding authors in modern African literature, Chinua Achebe and three other writers of world-wide acclaim; the American Robert Penn Warren, the British Joseph Conrad and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. At the basis of the research is a belief that a commonality of experience and interests can lead writers belonging to different cultural backgrounds and disparate geographic areas to write in a similar way and develop similar themes. A number of literary critics, inspired mainly by the ideologies of Negritude, the Black Arts movement and the notions allied to them, and convinced of the uniqueness of the African experience and the specific context of African writings, have very often compared Chinua Achebe’s novels with other works by African and Afro-American writers. Dwelling on these concepts (Negritude, the Black Arts movement) has blurred for them the cultural affinities that may exist between African and western writings. We have attempted to avoid the pitfalls of previous comparative criticism by establishing linkages between West African writing and Wstern literary traditions. This dissertation contains three chapters; the first chapter deals with the affinities between Achebe’s A Man of the People and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in terms of their characterisation, narrative structure, themes and mode of writing. The second treats the intertextual relationships between Achebe’s A Man of the People and Conrad’s Nostromo. In the third chapter, we have further carried our analysis by drawing parallels between Achebe’s A Man of the People and Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People. This chapter has considered the similarities in terms of characterisation, imagery and themes. The final conclusion that can be drawn from this comparison is that Achebe’s work can be read in the light of three distinct literary traditions: The American Southern literature, the Edwardian Literature of the turn of the 20th century and the Norwegian (Victorian) literature of the second half of the Nineteenth Century. This assumption has been more or less demonstrated in the present dissertation. The intertexts of Achebe’s A Man of the People are of three orders: literary affinity, influence difference and impact