Contextual and Textual Features of Folktales in Chinua Achebe’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper explores the contextual and textual features of folktales in Anglophone African literature, with a focus on Chinua Achebe’s prose fiction. After overviewing the register and Theme theories, it applies them to analyze ten (10) stories identified in the five novels published by the late Ibo writer. The findings reveal very high rates of circumstantial and hypotactic markedness, which are held up as distinctive features of a carefully written mode. On the other hand, the equally high rates of nominal un-markedness, verbal markedness and additive paratactic introduction of Themes are proved to indicate casually spoken mode. It is thus concluded that, though the tales initially belong to the orature mode, the writer has succeeded in incorporating them into thewritten one by keeping some balance between spokenness and writtenness.