Representation of the Rural Poor in Nigerian Social Realist Fiction: An Empirical Reading of Selected Novels

This study systematically analyses the representation of the rural poor in a selected corpus of Nigerian social realist fiction, examining the narrative strategies, ideological positions, and sociological accuracy with which literary authors construct fictional accounts of rural poverty, agrarian labour, and economic marginalisation in Nigeria. Social realist fiction makes an implicit claim to sociological truth, and the fidelity of its representations to the actual conditions of rural Nigerian life has significant implications for the role of literature in public understanding of poverty and social inequality. The study applies a combination of sociological literary criticism and close reading to eight Nigerian novels explicitly engaging with rural communities in South East, North Central, and South South Nigeria, published between 2010 and 2023. Sociological analysis compares the fiction's representation of land tenure, agricultural labour, community governance, gender relations in rural households, and environmental conditions with data from relevant Nigerian national surveys and community studies. Findings reveal that the sampled novels offer broadly accurate structural portraits of rural poverty but tend to romanticise community solidarity and underrepresent the structural political economy of rural-urban resource extraction that reproduces rural deprivation. Female characters in rural settings are more realistically rendered in recent fiction than in older novels in the corpus. The study argues that social realist fiction's ideological predispositions shape its sociological accuracy in identifiable ways. Keywords: social realism, rural poverty, Nigerian fiction, representation, sociological criticism.