Wole Soyinka: Tragic Classicism (Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing)

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka’s engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka’s writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka’s prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka’s critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka’s authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa’s ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka’s notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.

Adam Lecznar is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, UK. He is the author of Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (2020) and co-editor of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (2020).

Laura Jansen is Associate Professor in Classics & Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Borges' Classics: Global Encounters with the Graeco-Roman World (2018), editor of The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (2014), and general editor of the monograph series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing (Bloomsbury). Her next books are on Italo Calvino: Classics between Science and Literature and Susan Sontag: From Plato's Cave to Sarajevo.