An Analytical Study of Feminist Intertextuality in Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Buchi Emecheta

Intertextuality among Nigerian women writers constitutes a literary tradition that has not been systematically mapped, and the specific feminist conversations conducted across the fiction of Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Buchi Emecheta represent a significant but underanalysed dimension of South West and South East Nigerian women's literary history. This study conducted an analytical examination of feminist intertextual relationships across selected novels by these three authors, focusing on how each writer responds to, revises, and extends the others' feminist literary projects. A feminist intertextuality theory methodology combining Julia Kristeva's intertextual theory with African feminist literary criticism was applied. The analysis focused on how Adichie's Americanah and Purple Hibiscus explicitly engage with Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood and Second-Class Citizen through structural, thematic, and characterological reference. Atta's Everything Good Will Come was examined for its implicit dialogue with both predecessors on the questions of marriage, class, and female ambition in Nigerian urban society. Results showed that all three writers construct their female protagonists against an explicit background of the social institutions (marriage, family, education) that Emecheta's earlier fiction first made central to Nigerian women's literary discourse. The study provides the first systematic intertextual mapping of this feminist literary conversation and recommends its findings as a model for how literary traditions are built within and across generations of Nigerian women writers, with particular implications for courses at universities in the South West and South East zones.

Keywords: feminist intertextuality, Nigerian women writers, Adichie, Emecheta, Sefi Atta