History and Imaginative Creation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Abstract

Fiction has been the means through which the writer makes his/her experiences known. The writer is a lens through which the past is recovered and offers the means to its understanding. It represents an elucidation of social reality. It is also in this sense that literature is seen as a national biography, recounting the social conditions of certain periods in a nation’s history. Therefore, this research highlights the extent to which the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie through characters, styles, plots, settings, and events, portrays the interplay of fiction and historicity in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The study also investigates the different scopes of history prevalent in the selected novel as regards its political, cultural, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic patterns. This study adopted New Historicism as its theoretical framework which advocates the reading of a literary text to its era. The implication is that each text is said to assume proper function when set side-by-side with the history it textualizes, that is history codified. Methodologically, this study is Content Analysis based. Some critical works on the writings of the novelists by other critics were used as secondary sources.