Wole Soyinka: Tragic Classicism

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. The Nigerian author and activist remains the only Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his dramas, poems, memoirs and essays have become seminal examples of 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 perspectives and argues that Soyinka's authorial outlook is propelled by a hybrid form of classicism. Soyinka aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a global structure of values that ensures his enduring significance in modern literary culture. By exploring how Soyinka appeals to Greece and Rome to reflect on Africa's ancient past, the contemporary belief system of the Yoruba people in the southwestern part of Nigeria, and the significance of tragic literature, Lecznar makes the bold claim 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, identity and culture.