Feminism In Literature
Method of Research
The feminist, comparative and psychological approaches will be used throughout the study to analyze the literary works by Nwapa and Adichie. The novels will be analyzed using feminist and gender theories to understand the women portrayed in Nwapa and Adichie’s novels and the psychological theories will also be used to understand theories of identity and voicing. The comparative approach will be used to locate the similarities and differences between the two writers and their writings. Post-colonial theories may also be used to understand the colonizer-colonized experience and the effect of colonialism on the writers and their work.
Chapterization
The study will be divided into three chapters and a conclusion. The first
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As for the books, Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (1996) explores the role of African women as wives, daughters and mothers and talks about the Nigerian culture concentrating on the works of Flora Nwapa and how Nwapa portrays women in her novels and how she promotes change.
African Literature: Gender Discourse, Religious Values, and the African Worldview by Safoura Salami-Boukari (2012) gives the reader a historical background of Africa and explains sociocultural issues in Igbo society and their beliefs about men and women and discusses Nwapa’s character depictions.
Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952-1966 by Margaret Laurence and Nora Foster Stovel (2001) gives a biography of Flora Nwapa and gives a brief analysis of her novel Efuru, discussing the women in her novels and the decisions they make. Gender in African Women's Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference by Nfah-Abbenyi, and Juliana Makuchi (1997) sheds the light on gender, feminist theory and post-colonial women’s writing. It also discusses reconstructing identity and subjectivity in women’s
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As for the articles, “Daddy’s Girls?: Father-Daughter Relations and the Failures of the Postcolonial Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Véronique Tadjo’s Loin de mon père” is an article by Anna-Leena Toivanen (2013) which discusses post-colonialism and its effect and how Adichie portrays the image of colonialism as colonizer-colonized through the image of father-daughter relationship in her novel Purple Hibiscus.
“Producing Exile: Diasporic Vision in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun” an article by Susan Strehle (2011) explores Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun to analyze postcolonial Nigeria after the Biafran war and the effect of the war on the people and the society and their suffering and how the war forced the people into diaspora.
“Against All Odds: African Womanhood in Postcolonial African Women Writing” (2006) discusses how women reacted during post colonialism and how women did not accept colonization passively and the role they played during war looking at Nwapa’s novel
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