Browsing by Author "Moola, Fiona Fatima"

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    �Foundational fictions� Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa�s early Anglophone-Igbo novels
    (Taylor & Francis, 2019) Moola, Fiona Fatima
    The Igbo marriage song recorded by Ifi Amadiume in her influential ethnographic study of the Nnobi in Southeastern Nigeria is a reminder of the cross-cultural, trans-historical significance of some form of marriage in the establishment of some form of family as the foundation and guarantor of survival and stability of the social. Domestic happiness in the extended family of the Igbo context of the period in which the novel is set involves not only husband and wife, as in the nuclear family, but also the husband�s extended family relations. Analysing the gender dynamics of marriage is a focus of a vast number of feminist studies of African literature. Isidore Okpewho in �Understanding African Marriage: towards a Convergence of Literature and Sociology� contrasts the picture of marriage that occurs in African cultural expression, with marriage as it emerges in anthro-sociology. �Motherhood� is a concept that has come under intense scrutiny in the scholarship of African society and literature.
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    Plotting marriage and love in Elechi Amadi's The concubine: Extended realism in the African novel.
    (University of the Western Cape, 2019) Moola, Fiona Fatima
    Unlike most other 20th-century African writers, Elechi Amadi foregrounds the theme of romantic love in most of his fiction. Unlike the internationally canonized �village novels� of Chinua Achebe, Amadi�s �village novels� bracket the rupture of colonial modernity in order to rewrite and reinscribe the love-marriage plot, a plot structure subtending the origins of the novel in Europe in the 18th century. A transformed love-marriage plot is embedded in a network of alternative conceptions of intimate relations that simultaneously crosses the zone of the material world of procedural rationality into the spirit world constitutive of the substantive rationality of mythos. Variant marriage plot forms thus are nevertheless presented in a narrative that remains resolutely realist, obstructing the exoticizing othering of magic realism.