Preface
When one scholar published a book-length study of the writings of Wole
Soyinka inand gave it the titleWole Soyinka Revisited,he was re-
flecting in that title the fact that at the time, there were already about
eight other book-length studies or monographs on the Nigerian author
in print. Since then, the number of books and monographs on Soyinka
has grown steadily to the point that to date, studies devoted exclusively
to Soyinka’s works number more than a dozen and a half. And this is
without reference to important works like Jonathan Peters’A Dance of
Masks: Senghor, Achebe, Soyinka(), Tejumola Olaniyan’sScars of Con-
quests, Masks of Resistance() and Kole Omotoso’sAchebe or Soyinka
() which involve exhaustive comparison of Soyinka’s writings with
the works of other major African authors or writers from the African
diaspora. Moreover, there are at least five collections of critical essays on
Soyinka’s works, with others planned or projected. Finally, there are sev-
eral special issues of academic journals devoted specifically to the many
facets of Soyinka’s works and career.
Given this impressive number of full-length and full-scale studies of
Soyinka, it does seem obligatory to explain why I or anyone else should
set out to do yet another study of the Nigerian author. One explanation is
one which every single author of a study of Soyinka will perhaps hence-
forth have to invoke: our author has produced a quantitative and, more
importantly,qualitativebody of works which, for a long time to come,
is sure to generate diverse revisionary studies and totally fresh works
of interpretation and evaluation. While this book has definitely in part
been fostered by this factor, there is a more determinate basis for the
publication of the study. This arises from the fact that because Soyinka
has sustained an almost unbroken literary productivity over the course
of the last four decades, his output has generally tended to very quickly
outstrip the scope of each successive study of his writings. And on this
point, it is important to note that the more substantial of the full-length
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