Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Africa and orality
- 2 The folktale and its extensions
- 3 Festivals, ritual, and drama in Africa
- 4 Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa
- 5 Heroic and praise poetry in South Africa
- 6 African oral epics
- 7 The oral tradition in the African diaspora
- 8 Carnival and the folk origins of West Indian drama
- 9 Africa and writing
- 10 Ethiopian literature
- 11 African literature in Arabic
- 12 The Swahili literary tradition: an intercultural heritage
- 13 Africa and the European Renaissance
- 14 The literature of slavery and abolition
- 15 Discourses of empire
- 16 African-language literatures of southern Africa
- 17 Gikuyu literature: development from early Christian writings to Ngũgĩ’s later novels
- 18 The emergence of written Hausa literature
- 19 Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama
- 20 African literature and the colonial factor
- 21 The formative journals and institutions
- 22 Literature in Afrikaans
- References
19 - Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Africa and orality
- 2 The folktale and its extensions
- 3 Festivals, ritual, and drama in Africa
- 4 Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa
- 5 Heroic and praise poetry in South Africa
- 6 African oral epics
- 7 The oral tradition in the African diaspora
- 8 Carnival and the folk origins of West Indian drama
- 9 Africa and writing
- 10 Ethiopian literature
- 11 African literature in Arabic
- 12 The Swahili literary tradition: an intercultural heritage
- 13 Africa and the European Renaissance
- 14 The literature of slavery and abolition
- 15 Discourses of empire
- 16 African-language literatures of southern Africa
- 17 Gikuyu literature: development from early Christian writings to Ngũgĩ’s later novels
- 18 The emergence of written Hausa literature
- 19 Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama
- 20 African literature and the colonial factor
- 21 The formative journals and institutions
- 22 Literature in Afrikaans
- References
Summary
Yorùbá verbal art is one of Africa’s most remarkable fields of creativity, both in its variety and its extent. Oral traditions, some of them of great antiquity, continue to flourish and evolve; written literature constitutes one of the largest, longest-established, and liveliest traditions in Africa; there are also numerous new popular genres on the interface between written and oral modes. Supported by a public of about 30 million Yoruba-speakers, mostly in south western Nigeria, Yoruba literature plays a central role in many dimensions of ordinary life, ranging from lessons in school to life cycle ceremonies such as naming, marriage, and burial; from contact with ancestors to commentary on the contemporary national situation. Yoruba literary culture is also one of the few in Africa to be supported by an extensive, long-standing, and sophisticated local critical scholarship in the same language as the literature itself.
Oral genres
Oral genres constitute a vast field of expression with much intertextuality and cross-genre borrowing. Terminology for genres varies. Some genres are widely recognized, their key features agreed upon. But there is also much local specificity and much contextual variation in the use of terms even within a single locality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature , pp. 357 - 378Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000