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Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing Ato Quayson. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. x + 180 pp.
Although Ato Quayson developed this fine book from his dissertation for Cambridge, it shows little of the pedantic niceties and lugubrious prose that might relegate it to a library's annex. In fact, it succeeds admirably in its elegant and highly readable demonstration that African literature, here represented by a segment of Nigerian writing, deserves a nuanced analysis that acknowledges the full context in which the literature arises, along with the various stylistic decisions unique to each writer.
Quayson's chosen task is to extend earlier readings by Abiola Irele and others that focus on the Yoruba literary tradition, and to suggest that postcolonial attention to nation building and wider national realities prompted the writers under analysis to use the oral tradition in ways that were not strictly ethnic, and in ways that ultimately transmogrified the symbology of the stories. To do so, he turns his attention first to Reverend Samuel Johnson (whose History of the Yorubas was completed in 1897 and published in 1921), then to Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, and...