SOCIAL THEORY AND LITERARY SOURCES IN THE NOVELS OF BUCHI EMECHETA (NIGERIA)

Emecheta acknowledges two spheres of influence on her development as a writer: her research in social theory and British and Nigerian literary traditions. These two spheres focus this study--the relationship of her plots and characters to (1) the thinking of three sociologists--Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber; and (2) the British tradition in the novel, characterized by Charles Dickens, and Nigerian novelists Flora Nwapa and Chinua Achebe. The dissertation first presents the larger sociological themes involving individual and community conflict as summarized by selected critics of African literature; chapter one, in addition, examines Emecheta\u27s place as a woman writer in black Africa. Chapters two and three describe respectively the social theory and the patterns of literary inheritance that inform Emecheta\u27s fiction. Chapters four, five, and six examine the specific novels in the light of the social themes and literary modes. The first two novels, as fictional biography, become an ideological exploration of class, race, sex, and property, always with an eye towards the sociological institutions that oppress. In the Ditch (1973) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) indict industrial and capitalist society. The next novels, set in Nigeria among the Ibo tribe in the eastern provinces and in Lagos, describe conditions where the tradition proves greater than the individual will. The Bride Price (1976) and The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979) involve a comparable challenge for a woman to identify herself as a person rather than a possession. In her novels, Nigerian Buchi Emecheta deals symbolically with the social forces that shape the lives of individuals: how and why, in Max Weber\u27s words, people act with and against each other. The common thematic ground revolves literally around the African woman and her sense of self as defined against built-in barriers to survival in Africa and the West. Emecheta places the experiences of women within a broad context of social inequities in England, in the West as a whole, and in the third world, centering her work on the relationship between the individual and the community