Developing an Original Afrocentric Narratology for the Study of Nigerian Prose Fiction

Classical narratology, from Genette and Todorov to Fludernik and Herman, was developed primarily through engagement with European prose fiction and carries conceptual assumptions about temporality, focalization, and narrative voice that are often inadequate for the distinctive narrative structures of African prose fiction. This study developed an original Afrocentric narratology specifically designed for the analysis of Nigerian prose fiction. A multi-stage theory-building methodology was employed: systematic critical review of narratological theory applied to African fiction in 55 publications; primary corpus analysis of 30 Nigerian novels representing all six geopolitical zones, three historical periods, and five languages of composition; structured workshops with 18 Nigerian narrative scholars; and expert validation through a two-round Delphi consultation with 20 narratology and African literature specialists. The corpus analysis identified five narrative features of Nigerian prose fiction that are either poorly served by or entirely absent from existing narratological frameworks: communal focalization (the text's use of a community rather than an individual as perceiving subject), ancestral time (narrative time structures organised around cyclical return and ancestral repetition rather than linear progression), oral address markers (narrative devices that position the implied reader as a live audience), supernatural narrator authority (the use of narrators whose knowledge authority derives from divine or spiritual rather than omniscient realist sources), and praise name narration (the use of oriki-like character description to establish moral and social identity). The original Afrocentric Narratology Framework provides analytical tools for each of these five features with worked examples.