Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Soyinka, Wole (Vol. 179) - Patrick Colm Hogan (essay date winter 1998)


Soyinka, Wole (Vol. 179) - Patrick Colm Hogan (essay date winter 1998)

Patrick Colm Hogan (essay date winter 1998)

SOURCE: Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Particular Myths, Universal Ethics: Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers in the New Nigeria.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 584-95.

[In the following essay, Hogan explores the ethical and mythic aspects of Soyinka's plays, focusing on his early drama The Swamp Dwellers.]

In Myth, Literature, and the African World, Wole Soyinka set out to formulate a theory of African literature in relation to myth. He criticized African writers who based their work on European cosmologies, urging instead greater attention to African systems of belief. In his preface, Soyinka went so far as to say that “There is nothing to choose ultimately between the colonial mentality of … West Africa's first black bishop, who grovelled before his white missionary superiors … and the new black ideologues who are embarrassed” by African traditions. “Like his...

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