The Concept of an African Prose Literature

Abstract

Prose is simply defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “… the ordinary form of written or spoken language without metrical structure” and certainly for a majority of native English speakers this definition serves well enough, though in English, prose is more usually understood to be written rather than spoken. Most people have a more or less clear idea of what they mean by prose, if only because there is a large body of accepted verse with which to contrast it, a contrast not materially affected by the problems posed by modern verse techniques. There is also a pretty wide measure of agreement as to what constitutes literature, again because there is a corpus of material, accumulated over the centuries, which is regarded as such by common consent. This material provides a basis for judgments of value on more recent work, so that one can make some sort of contrast between “Gibbon's History and to-night's evening paper” but there is bound to be futile argument over certain cases, and one can be sure that there will be divergence from the current view with the passage of time. All in all, however, there is likely to be a large area over which one may obtain a fair measure of agreement as to what may be termed the prose literature of English.