Mythic displacement in Nigerian narratives: An introduction

Abstract

Five decades of resorting to humanistic critical procedures have bequeathed to the Nigerian critical practice the legacy of examining and discovering in Nigerian and African narratives the historical and social concepts of the time and times they are presumed to posit. These concepts include colonialism, corruption, war, political instability, and culture conflict. These procedures are undertaken without due regard to seeing the whole of the literary tradition as a stream out of which narratives emerge. This article, therefore, by way of introduction, seeks to retrieve Nigerian narratives from "every author" and humanistic critical approach by placing them in a realm where a holistic method such as Frye's could be applied. Here, the traverses of the structure of mythical imagery such as the mythos of crime and punishment as embodied in these narratives and how this structure was displaced/shrouded from Frye's first mimetic mode to the last, via the concept of mythic displacement, will be analysed.