In pursuit of the “real” Nigeria/n through the archives of Heinemann’s African writers series

Walsh, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5574-1074 (2023) In pursuit of the “real” Nigeria/n through the archives of Heinemann’s African writers series. Humanities, 12 (5). 88. ISSN 2076-0787 doi: 10.3390/h12050088

Abstract/Summary

This paper will depart from the premise that with the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe as its flagship author, exemplar and editorial adviser, Heinemann Educational Books, which aimed to represent Africa and Africans through its African Writers Series (AWS) had a tendency to privilege and prioritise realist literary expressions coming out of Africa. This, combined with the fact that the series was published by an educational company looking for a way to market its product in an environment that did not yet have a place for African writers when it was first launched, might also be regarded as having fostered a tendency within the publishing house to treat the works submitted to it more as socio-historical documents than as works of literary fiction and to lead to their framing in anthropological terms. The paper will investigate the precise terms in which this takes place in two case studies of some of the archival material relating to Heinemann’s interest in representing Northern Nigeria and Nigerians in the early years of the series, and it will investigate the consequences and implications of a drive towards producing a series that could be marketed as representative.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/113159
Identification Number/DOI	10.3390/h12050088
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
Publisher	MDPI AG
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