Critical Approaches: Ossie Enekwe

This concentration on the writing of Ossie Enekwe arises from the need to assess the maturation of Enekwe's craft beginning from Broken Pots and Marching to Kilimanjaro through Enekwe's more remarkable short fiction, The Last Battle and other Stories and his full length novel Come Thunder. The book emerges in three parts. Critiques, is the longest of the series containing scholarly assessments of Enekwe's poetry by literary scholars from around the world. Enekwe is compared with contemporary African poets such as Kofi Anyidoho, Chin Ce, Joe Ushie and Agwu Ude. The second part of the book deals with reviews of Enekwe's lesser known writings while the third part features a chat with Enekwe on literary and other aspects of Nigerian history. All of these seem to support what has been said of Enekwe's works as incorporating "the rhythm of our exciting but agonizingly self-destructive world."

Series editor GMT Emezue writes that it is easy to understand the tragic notes of Enekwe's stories or the threnody underlying his poetry as they throw more light on polemical issues usually glossed over by critics of Enekwe's own, and some of the younger, generation of Nigerian writers. The critical approaches in this book will no doubt widen the latitude for historical, ideological and stylistic criticism of contemporary writing in Nigeria and Africa.