Introduction: Everything Good Is Raining: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation

Abstract

The origins of this special issue of Research in African Literatures date back to 1998 when the guest editors, Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton, drew up plans to assemble a collection of essays on what we referred to as third-gen eration Nigerian writing. This resulted in a special issue of the South Africa-based journal English in Africa, titled New Nigerian Writing and published in 2005. The essays and reviews collected in that volume focused on emergent writers who had acquired a creative identity markedly different from that of second genera tion writers [such as Niyi Osundare, Festus Iyayi, Odia Ofeimun, Femi Osofisan, Zainab Alkali, Tess Onwueme and Bode Sowande] (Adesanmi and Dunton 7). An important stimulus for the exercise was the recognition that while the work of third-generation authors was receiving considerable journalistic coverage?within Nigeria and to some extent elsewhere?hardly any sustained scholarly attention had yet been paid to this corpus. In referring to the work of a third generation of writers, we were engaging in an exercise in system description, in this case a type of description that demarcates a literary field. Clearly the question then arises, where to place the field posts, and on this question rest others, such as When is a generation? Harry Garuba ably addressed these matters in his contribution to the volume.