EVOLUTION OF LOCAL, NATIONAL OR REGIONAL LITERATURE INTO WORLD LITERATURE: THINGS FALL APART, SO LONG A LETTER AND WIZARD OF THE CROW IN PERSPECTIVE

Laura Haruna-Banke

Abstract


World literature has become an important area of enquiry. This is because it projects human interaction through literature across the world to make humans think broadly. The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of world literature from local, national or regional literatures employing Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow as paradigms. The three novels selected here have not been combined before by scholars for studies of this nature, which makes this paper imperative. The paper is qualitative research, and it dwells on a discourse approach. It discovers that world literature is literature that is massively read across cultural divides, either in its original language of production or translation to foreign languages. The conditions that make literary texts enter world literature include their widespread (that is, circulation) across the world, translation to multiple foreign languages, use of the English language as a creative tool and universal relatability of its themes. Thus, it is seen that these factors facilitated Things Fall Apart, So Long a Letter and Wizard of the Crow, entry into world literature, emanating from their local, national or regional boundaries.

 

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Keywords


World literature, translation, Things Fall Apart, So Long a Letter, Wizard of the Crow

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejls.v6i2.667

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