Essays on the poetic of Nation Formation in the Short Story and Poetry of Selected Nigerian Writers

Description

“Essays on the poetic of Nation Formation in the Short Story and Poetry of Selected Nigerian Writers” examines the crises of nation building in Nigerian literature. The import is to establish the extent to which the various challenges bedeviling the state have undermined the effort towards nation formation as aesthetically reflected in the selected short story and poetry of prominent Nigerian writers. The common ground in all the articles is their authors’ commitment to the themes of public welfare, especially with the issues that transcend the individual and ventures in to the collective survival of the nation, or a majority of the people who are suffering from an economically fractured society. Other areas of concern ot the writers is their engagement with the challenges of governance in a nation where the lots of the people or the lower classes, are threatened by violence, economic deprivation, uncertainty of life and social justice and or where their collective destiny or shared ideals are being destroyed by the culture of corruption. In the face of the appalling political mismanagement, corruption becomes an endemic monster that impoverishes and devastates the nation. Faced with this catastrophic situation, many Nigerian writers switched the focus of their creative writings from community glorification in the 1960s to pressing political issues and thus ruthlessly mounting artistic resistance to the steady, often savage erosion of freedom and justice taking place around them. The unique ways by which the selected writers have aesthetically responded to the many challenges of governance of the Nigeria state is the major preoccupation of this book.