I have included this because in Chapter 6, "English Romantic Discourse: Women vs Men", the primary texts described are drawing on romantic fiction in order to critique it. I am unsure, therefore, how many of these texts (written in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s) are actually romances themselves (i.e. with a happy ending for the protagonists). I also get the impression that the models of "romance" being copied are not necessarily "romance" in the modern sense, though they could be. The model texts are, though, precursors of the modern romance and I felt the their reception might be of interest to users of the database.
Nigerian romances differ in numerous respects from the British and American tradition from which they draw inspiration. Rarely does the crooning, sighing, letter-writing ‘I’ in Nigerian romantic novels signify a morally exemplary protagonist; nor, authors emphasise, should readers ‘lose’ themselves in the emotional intensity of the story or empathise with romantic protagonists in the manner described by Janice Radway ([1984] 1991) in her influential study of women romance readers in North America. Packed with apologies, proposals, conflicts, jealousies, and more, these pamphlets open windows onto ordinary people’s emotional preoccupations in the 1950s and 1960s and showcase the wisdom and erudition of authors as advice-givers, while insisting that the printed, literary nature of English romantic expression renders it useless, even dangerous, if mimicked in real life.
In Nigerian pamphlets, declarations of romantic love signal the presence of moral hazards. (114)
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if impressive displays of literary dexterity are unsuitable for the development of ordinary relationships on the ground, the popular romance retains a position of high literary distinction in authors’ eyes. (118)
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Popular romances provided platforms for local authors to display their virtuosity in English. Seen as literary displays rather than models for emulation, romantic expression is thus a sign of authorial distinction as much as its is a vehicle for descriptions of emotional interiority. Onitsha’s romantic novelists quarantine romantic discourse in splendid isolation, from where readers are expected to appreciate their mastery of the English language and admire their abilities as men of letters capable of producing rich fantasies in dense English prose while also, crucially, adopting the critical consciousness nurtured in readers by decades of literary training in West African newspapers.
Locally published romances break away from the newsprint genres described so far in their refusal to offer models for emulation. Readers are firmly positioned on the outside looking in, invited to lionise authors for imaginative outbursts that they, as readers, will never be able to emulate. In composing romantic prose and brandishing their skills with this most complex – and flowery – English, local novelists claim their place in the highest echelons of literary expression. (118)
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This type of romantic language was referred to as ‘Shakespeare’s stylish way of writing’ (Aririguzo 1960b: n.pag.). Chief among its admirers was Cyril N. Aririguzo, who repeatedly lifted material from English popular romances and spliced it into quasi-localised settings: ‘My pleasure grounds were fringed with fragrant groves of orange and myrtle, where hundreds of full voiced nightingales warbled their love-melodies to the golden moon’, gushes the first-person narrator of Miss Appolo’s Pride Leads Her to be Unmarried (1960a), ventriloquising verbatim and at length from Bertha M. Clay’s (pseud. Charlotte Mary Brame) international bestseller, Love Works Wonders, which had been published in 1878 (Aririguzo: 10). Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) is cited next. (120)
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the romantic novelists described in this chapter display an acute critical engagement with their sources, ventriloquising the style of British romantic fiction only in order to critique it. Over and over, pamphlets juxtapose extreme violence against women with scenes of male romance-reading. In Benjamin O. Chiazor’s Back to Happiness, for example, the first-person narrator, Agatha, falls in love with a man whose addiction to English popular romances and aspirations to be a popular novelist obstruct, rather than facilitate, their relationship. The romantic hero, Lucky, spends all of his time reclining in the shade of a mango tree reading [Bertha M.] Clay’s novels, oblivious to the goings-on around him and completely passive while Agatha, his beloved, who lives next-door, fetches and carries water from her house and is whipped by her father until she bleeds for putting Lucky above her parents’ choice of marriage partner. (123)
I have included this because in Chapter 6, "English Romantic Discourse: Women vs Men", the primary texts described are drawing on romantic fiction in order to critique it. I am unsure, therefore, how many of these texts (written in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s) are actually romances themselves (i.e. with a happy ending for the protagonists). I also get the impression that the models of "romance" being copied are not necessarily "romance" in the modern sense, though they could be. The model texts are, though, precursors of the modern romance and I felt the their reception might be of interest to users of the database.
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