Care and Crisis in Chinua Achebe’s Novels

This book is a new study of Chinua Achebe’s novels in which they are read as works of literary art, as literary works are studied and discussed within the discipline of literary studies and criticism. A central concept, care, which is a humane value, is found to run in the texts, and is the crux of the test that the major characters are subjected to. What challenges them as things to be taken care of through concern may be a human being in a dire circumstance, as with Ikemefuna (Things Fall Apart), the human group itself exposed to famine in what should be harvest time (Arrow of God), or the state which needs to be brought to its proper being, as Heidegger would say (No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People), or human suffering calling to be relieved (Anthills of the Savannah). The novels are all in the tragic mode, because intervention is under some kind of interdiction.

Akwanya, Amechi N. is a retired Professor of English & Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters. Besides his numerous journal and book articles, he also has many books on theoretical and practical questions of literary studies and language. Of these, the most recent are Literature and Aspects of Causality and Literary Criticism: From Formal to Questions of Method, both by the University of Nigeria Press. He is the author of Orimili (a novel, Heinemann, 1991 at http: //www.geocities.com/africanwriters/ AuthorsA.html), and several poetry collections. He gave the 17th Inaugural Lecture of the University of Nigeria, entitled: English Language Learning in Nigeria: In Search of an Enabling Principle (Nsukka, 2007), and the 4th Professorial Valedictory Lecture of the University entitled No Longer a Tribe: Chinua Achebe, the Novel, and Optimistic Postcoloniality (2022).