Ghanaian International Novelists And Popular Aesthetics

Abstract

The critics of Ghanaian novels written in English mobilise three main approaches to study them: first, Africanist literary criticism which approaches texts through the perspective of the oral tradition, and seeks mainly to document the influence of traditional verbal arts on their production; second, Marxist / social realist criticism which adopts a sociological approach, and focuses on class struggle in African societies as induced by the experience of colonialism; finally, postcolonial literary theory which sees the Ghanaian novel as a locus for discursive strategies that grapple with the assumptions of colonialist discourse. In this paper, however, we intend to explore a new approach to the Ghanaian fiction based on the literary aesthetic of “market fictions”, also called popular fictions, as opposed to the international texts produced by “elite” or well known “international” novelists, such as Kofi Awoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah, Amma Darko, and published by international publishers, such as Heinemann and McMillan.