Browse Items (26 total)

Fluctuating between magical and literary realism, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is a novel that shifts between African folklore traditions and the literary styles of the West. Set in an unnamed postcolonial Nigerian city, The Famished Road follows…

Chinua Achebe, famed author of Things Fall Apart, is recognized as a key author of postcolonial fiction. In his memoir There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Achebe addresses his personal experiences living in Nigeria during…

Anchoring her poetic narrative in the midst of the Great Migration, Rita Dove knits together the story of Thomas and Beulah, a black couple living in the industrial and urban Midwest. Divided into two halves, the first twenty-three poems in the…

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antebellum novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally published as a serial piece in The National Era newspaper in 1851 and 1852. Eventually published as a novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a controversial historical legacy. Heralded…

Helon Habila’s debut novel Waiting for an Angel is a literary endeavor to capture a sliver of Nigeria’s postcolonial history. Following a journalist and poet living in the country following the colonial period, Habila utilizes historical moments to…

Set on a Georgia plantation in 1832 and narrated by protagonist 47, a child born into slavery, we follow 47 as he meets a runaway slave from a nearby plantation, Tall John. Alluding to folklore, Tall John mirrors the legend of High John the…