Comparative Analysis of Gender Representation in Selected Nigerian and Ghanaian Women’s Fiction

This study conducts a comparative analysis of gender representation in selected novels by Nigerian and Ghanaian women writers, examining both the shared feminist concerns and the nationally and culturally distinct inflections that characterise women's fiction from these two dominant West African literary traditions. Nigeria and Ghana share colonial history, religious cultural contexts, and broad West African social norms regarding gender, but their literary traditions have developed in dialogue with distinct national political histories and cultural debates, making comparison between the two productive for identifying both commonalities and differences in women's literary responses to patriarchal constraint. The study compares two Nigerian texts, Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come and Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, with two Ghanaian novels, Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy and Abena Busia's Testimonies of Exile, applying an African feminist critical framework. Analysis focuses on the construction of female agency, the representation of marriage as an institution of gender control, the role of female friendships, and the relationship between gender liberation and national political consciousness in each text. Findings reveal significant convergences in the critique of bourgeois domesticity but divergent approaches to the role of traditional culture, with Ghanaian texts more directly engaging with indigenous feminist alternatives and Nigerian texts more focused on the Christian patriarchal household. Keywords: gender representation, Nigerian women's fiction, Ghanaian literature, African feminism, comparative literature.