An Empirical Study of the Gap in Research on Igbo Oral Literature’s Relationship to Written Fiction

The relationship between Igbo oral literary traditions and the emergence of Igbo-inflected Anglophone fiction is a subject of significant scholarly importance that has been incompletely addressed in comparative literary research. This study conducted a systematic examination of the research gap in scholarly work on Igbo oral literature and its literary descendants in South East Nigerian prose fiction. A scoping review and gap analysis methodology was employed, searching nine academic databases for publications from 2015 to 2024 that explicitly addressed the relationship between Igbo oral literary traditions and written fiction by Igbo authors. Sixty-one eligible publications were identified and analysed for theoretical framework used, oral literary forms addressed, authors studied, research methods employed, and key claims made. Results showed that Igbo oral literature is cited as background context in 78.7 percent of studies of Igbo fiction but is the primary analytical focus in only 19.7 percent. Formal analysis of how specific oral narrative devices are structurally transformed in written prose is present in fewer than 15 percent of studies. Women oral literature traditions, masquerade literary forms, and Igbo proverb systems as literary devices are the most significantly underresearched areas. The study proposes a research agenda encompassing six priority topics and outlines an original methodology for tracking the structural transformation of oral narrative devices across the oral-written literary interface. This constitutes an original contribution to the theorisation of the Igbo oral-written literary relationship in South East Nigerian Comparative Literature scholarship.