Obumselu on African Literature: The Intellectual Muse
This compendium brings together, in one volume for the first time, Obumselu’s highly celebrated work on African literature. With the dialectic of cultures as the presiding preoccupation of his work, and appraising the place of African literature in the universal scheme of cultural interchange his critical speciality, Obumselu espoused a scholarship with a necessarily indispensable comparative dimension, as the articles anthologised in this volume as African literature reveal. The expertise with which he explores the oeuvres of many Western writers because of the light they shed on the creative endeavours of African writers is offset only by the rigour with which he explores the transformative impact of indigenous African literature on the craft of many distinguished African writers. Obumselu’s discovery of a tradition of the African novel almost entirely rooted in the poetics of African folklore, which began with Mofolo and Plaatje and blossomed in Camara Laye and Ben Okri, is a highlight of his incisive scholarship and reverberates through many of the works here. The originality of his insights, his analytic rigour, the catholicity of his tastes and competences, and the power and grace of his expression make this volume compelling.
Educated at Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria, and the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, Professor Isidore Diala currently teaches in the Department of English and Literary Studies at Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria. He is the editor of The Responsible Critic: Essays on African Literature in Honor of Professor Ben Obumselu (2006).
“A solid academic, one of the pioneers of the distinctive University of Ibadan brand, and one whose personality helped to shape Nigeria’s collegial culture before its later debasement… This volume fills in a yawning gap in the compendium of African literary criticism, since Obumselu was such a reticent expositor of his own productivity.”
Wole Soyinka
“Wherever Obumselu’s name was evoked, it was always with uncustomary reverence… The reverence was for his solid scholarship and perspicacious mind; his assured, limpid prose which lent to his pronouncements a kind of magisterial poise; his cool and classical power of exegesis. This compendium of Obumselu’s work is an invaluable contribution to the criticism of African literature.”
Femi Osofisan
“This compendium is a welcome tribute to Ben Obumselu, one of the most widely read, liberally educated, and profoundly cerebral scholars Nigeria has ever produced... In it, we encounter the genial, affable, humorous, and disarmingly accessible gentleman—a scholar who knew how to captivate without being intimidating.”
Niyi Osundare
“Ben Obumselu did not write much—most of his critical productions are available here. This was perhaps an innate habit of perfection, a proneness to treat knowledge as something that would endure, deserving to be honed like a work of art.”
Dan Izevbaye
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