This book contributes to the growth of African Literature, particularly to the understanding of the writings of Chinua Achebe as an icon and one of the pioneers and prominent writers in African literature. It is a scholarly work that highlights lots of topical issues over the notion of genre in terms of literary theory and criticism of the African novel. Hence, it shows broadly how Achebe uses his culture or more relevantly his oral tradition to build a literary genre that is specific to him and to Africa in general.

By evoking other critics and writers, this work focuses basically on Chinua Achebe’s first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) and his latest one, Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Handled through a sober style, a stylistic approach and from a postcolonial perspective, it offers a broad reflection on how the African writer uses the oral tradition to rehabilitate history and to let the oral culture survive within the written one by means of the novel as an archaeological instrument that makes people hear the voice of African oral tradition in the novel with innovative strategies and methods of putting things together.