ABSTRACT
In 1958 a novel was published which began: ‘Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.’ With this simple sentence, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe began what was to become one of the classics of world literature, Things Fall Apart. The novel outlines the tragic story of Okonkwo, an important man in his clan in the days before the whites arrived in West Africa. Its aim was to question received ideas about the history and way of life of colonized people, by means of characters and a story that brought the reader into intimate contact with their everyday experience. This has been the traditional claim of the realist novel: to tell a tale not told before, using techniques that involve readers closely with the individual in a specific society, towards the ultimate objective of extending their sympathies and understanding. It is a claim that, arguably, does not become out of date. In this concluding chapter, we will touch on some of the ways in which the genre seems to have survived up to the present.
