Amazon.com description: Product Description: Neil McEwan has made a forceful and distinctive entry to the discussion of African fiction with this book. He benefits throughout from the depth and extent of his reading in the general literature of criticism. Few earlier critics of the African novel, indigenous or foreign, have had this grounding in the theory of the subject which, despite the protests of the more chauvinistic commentators, does illuminate the reading of any literature, however different or autonomous it may claim to be. The point is that theory can accommodate difference, but can also make sense of it and relate it where necessary to what we already know.