The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance

Isidore Okpewho's The Epic in Africa is a foundational scholarly study by a Nigerian literary scholar arguing, against an earlier assumption that epic was a peculiarly European or Homeric form, that African oral traditions produce genuine epic poetry with their own aesthetics of performance. Its authority rests on close comparative analysis across multiple African oral epic traditions combined with Okpewho's own standing as a leading Africanist literary scholar working partly from within the cultures he studies. As an argument-driven work of literary theory rather than a neutral catalog, its classifications and comparative claims represent one influential scholarly position within African oral literature studies, since which traditions count as epic and by what criteria remains a live scholarly conversation Okpewho's book helped shape rather than closed.