Things Fall Apart Essay | Critical Essay #1

Things Fall Apart Critical Essay #1

In the following essay, Bennett, a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Santa Barbara, examines how issues of history, culture, and gender have affected Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and how the novel is valuable both as a literary work and an introduction to African literature.

As the most widely read work of African fiction, Things Fall Apart has played an instrumental role in introducing African literature to readers throughout the world. In particular, Achebe's fiction has contributed to world literature by retelling African history, as well as the history of European colonization, from an Afro-centric perspective rather than a Euro-centric one. By shifting the narrative focus from the perspective of the colonizer to the perspective of the colonized, Achebe's novels reveal and correct many of the biased assumptions found in previous historical and literary descriptions of Africa. Specifically, they reaffirm the value of African cultures by representing their...
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