Wole Soyinka: Tragic Classicism

(Paperback)

Available Formats

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinkas engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinkas writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinkas prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinkas critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history.

Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinkas authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africas ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinkas notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.

Reviews

At the core of this book is a supple, syncretic model of tragic classicism that encompasses Yoruba, other African, ancient Greek and Roman, and English cultural influences, and brings additional cultures into consideration through comparative analysis. Wole Soyinka: Tragic Classicism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Soyinkas thought.

Emily Greenwood, James F. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

-- Emily Greenwood, James F. Rothenberg Professor of the Classics and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

Author Bio

Adam Lecznar is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, UK. He is the author of Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (2020) and co-editor of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (2020).