The Historical Development of Igbo Written Literature: A Genealogical Account from Missionary Texts to Digital Publication

This dissertation constructs a comprehensive genealogical account of the historical development of Igbo written literature from the earliest missionary publications of the nineteenth century through the digital publication revolution of the twenty-first century, producing the first monograph-length historical narrative of the Igbo literary writing system as a social and cultural institution. The history of Igbo written literature has been narrated in fragments across disparate scholarly texts but has never received the sustained institutional-historical treatment that comparable national literary traditions in Africa and beyond have attracted. Drawing on an extensive archival research programme spanning mission society archives in the United Kingdom, national archives in Enugu and Abuja, library special collections at six Nigerian universities, and digital publication databases, the study constructs a four-period periodisation of Igbo literary history: the missionary translation period (1857-1920), the colonial literacy expansion period (1920-1960), the post-independence nationalist period (1960-2000), and the digital proliferation period (2000-present). Each period is analysed for its institutional drivers, dominant literary forms, key authors and their socio-political positions, and language planning implications. Findings reveal a consistent tension between metropolitan standardisation pressures and peripheral dialectal creative resistance across all periods. The digital period is characterised by unprecedented formal and linguistic diversity, facilitated by the removal of gatekeeping publishing institutions. Keywords: Igbo written literature, literary history, genealogy, missionary texts, digital publication.