Empirical Study of Genre Mixing in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction and its Comparative Global Analogues

Genre hybridity, the mixing of realist fiction, oral tradition, speculative narrative, and documentary form within a single literary work, is a characteristic feature of contemporary Nigerian fiction that has parallels in global literary movements but has not been systematically mapped and compared. This study empirically analysed genre mixing practices in twenty contemporary Nigerian novels (2015 to 2024) and compared them with comparable genre hybridity in Latin American, South Asian, and West African literature from the same period. A computational literary analysis methodology was applied, supplemented by close reading and genre theory. The corpus of twenty novels was analysed for structural markers of genre mixing, including the presence of oral narrative conventions, documentary materials, speculative elements, epistolary forms, and non-linear temporality within primarily realist frameworks. The comparative corpus drew on published genre analyses of Jesmyn Ward, Roberto Bolano, Arundhati Roy, and Maaza Mengiste. Results showed that genre mixing is characteristic of 75 percent of the Nigerian corpus, significantly higher than in the comparative Latin American corpus (54 percent) but comparable to the South Asian corpus (71 percent). The most common Nigerian genre mixing pattern combines realist narration with embedded oral narrative in a form that has no direct equivalent in the global comparison corpora. The study provides the first systematic empirical mapping of genre mixing in contemporary Nigerian fiction and argues that this distinctive formal feature marks a genuine Nigerian contribution to global literary form, warranting specific attention in Comparative Literature scholarship.