by Romanus Aboh
The book takes up the question of how Nigerian novels do things with words, to echo the title of J. L. Austin’s lectures about performative language, including words like jollof, egusi, eba and oyibo. Its author brings the fields of literature and sociolinguistics into contact with each other. Literary scholars too often focus either on the stylistic elements or on the political ideology of a text, but this book endeavours to show that literary language cannot be separated from the social uses to which it is put.
