Comparative Epistemologies of Narrative in West African Oral and Written Literary Traditions: Towards an African Narratology

This dissertation develops an original contribution to African narratology by constructing a comparative framework for the epistemological assumptions that govern story-telling in West African oral literary traditions and their transformations in the written Anglophone fiction of Nigeria and Ghana. Existing narratology draws its foundational theoretical categories from European literary and structural traditions, and while there have been calls for a postcolonial narratology, no sustained theoretical programme has been constructed from the specific epistemological premises of West African oral narrative traditions. The dissertation proceeds through three phases: a theoretical phase constructing an African epistemology of narrative from systematic engagement with Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Akan oral narrative scholarship; an analytical phase applying the constructed framework to the study of narrative authority, temporal organisation, causality attribution, and audience relationality in a corpus of West African oral texts collected from the archive of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan and the University of Ghana; and an application phase reading selected Nigerian and Ghanaian novels through the constructed African narratological framework to identify how oral narrative epistemologies are transformed, retained, or subverted in their transit to written literary form. Original theoretical contributions include the African narratological framework itself, a concept of communal narrative authority as distinct from individual authorship, and a theory of what the study terms episodic causality as a West African narrative organisation principle. Keywords: African narratology, oral tradition, narrative epistemology, West African fiction, comparative literature.