An Original Comparative Study of Modernism and African Modernity in Nigerian and Egyptian Literary Fiction

The engagement of African literatures with modernism as a global literary movement has been studied primarily in West African and South African contexts, with the significant Egyptian and Northern African literary traditions rarely brought into comparative relationship with sub-Saharan African modernisms. This study conducted an original comparative investigation of modernism and African modernity in Nigerian and Egyptian literary fiction, examining how writers from both traditions engaged with and transformed European modernist techniques within their own socio-historical conditions. A comparative literary modernism methodology drawing on accounts of vernacular modernism, peripheral modernisms, and African modernity theory was employed. The Nigerian corpus comprised works by Wole Soyinka, Kole Omotoso, and Gabriel Okara, while the Egyptian corpus drew on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Latifa al-Zayyat. The comparative analysis examined formal features including stream of consciousness, temporal fragmentation, urban alienation, and language experimentation across both corpora. Results showed that Nigerian literary modernism is characterised by a systematic integration of oral literary forms into modernist formal experiments, producing a distinctive South-South modernism that has no European equivalent. Egyptian literary modernism, by contrast, engages more directly with French and European realist traditions through the mediating influence of Arabic literary modernism. The study's original contribution is the Afro-Mediterranean Modernism Paradigm, a comparative framework for understanding modernist literary production in Africa as a bifurcated but interconnected field shaped by both Arabic-Mediterranean and oral-traditional mediations of European form.

Keywords: African modernism, Nigerian fiction, Egyptian literature, comparative modernism, original framework