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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Tradition and the Yoruba writer: D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka |
Author: | Irele, Abiola |
Year: | 1975 |
Periodical: | Odù: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies |
Issue: | 11 |
Pages: | 75-100 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Nigeria |
Subjects: | literature Yoruba |
Abstract: | The author ventures to say that the links between the three writers discussed here demonstrate a commitment out of a sense of a responsive connection of the writer's individual imagination to the communal spirit. The work of Fagunwa and Tutuola grow out of a living tradition, and in the writings of Wole Soyinka, we find a personal appropriation and reinterpretation in new terms of Yoruba cosmology, so that it exists in his work as an authentic mode of vision. The artistic experience of the three writers, taken together, represents a development of the common stock of images in a way that is not only a restatement of their significance in the context of the traditional experience, but also of their continuing truth for modern man. Their work expresses the essence of myth as a comprehensive metaphor oflife: as a re-formulation of experience at the level of image and symbol so as to endow it with an intense spiritual significance. Notes and ref. |