Ghanaian popular fiction: 'Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life' and other tales

Stephanie Newell's multifaceted study of Ghanaian popular writing from the 1930s to the present time is an ambitious project that does more than provide textual reading of selected texts as representative of a genre. With chapters on Ghanaian readers' comments, on contemporary magazines in Ghana, on publishing and popular literature in West Africa, on parallels between Ghanaian and Nigerian popular writing, in addition to the expected discussions of specific authors, styles, and texts, this book gives us a fuller understanding of the many factors at work in the emergence of a popular literature in a given postcolonial setting. It builds on the earlier work on Ghanaian popular fiction carried out by scholars like Richard Priebe, and does for Ghanaian popular fiction what Emanuel Obiechina did for Onitsha Market Literature in the 1970s, with the added benefits of insights derived from contemporary theory. While readers who think of African literature research mainly in terms of textual analysis might be disappointed, Newell's strategy addresses issues that remain relevant for African and other postcolonial literatures, namely: who reads and how, who writes and how, who assesses the text, and why?