Oct-Dec (2025)

Stylistic Innovation and Resistance in Postcolonial Anglophone Literature: From Achebe to Adichie

Chander Mohan

Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, Government Degree College, Majalta, Jammu and Kashmir, India.

This paper analyses how postcolonial Anglophone writers have appropriated, subverted, and transformed the English language as a means of articulating experiences and epistemologies that European literary traditions were not designed to accommodate. Beginning with Chinua Achebe's foundational theoretical intervention the claim that African writers must bend English to bear the weight of African experience the paper traces the stylistic strategies employed by postcolonial novelists across half a century to make English speak beyond its metropolitan inheritance. Close readings of representative works by Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Mohsin Hamid illuminate recurrent techniques of linguistic defiance: the incorporation of untranslated indigenous vocabulary, the disruption of syntactic convention, the use of oral narrative structures within written prose, and the deployment of irony and parody against the colonial literary canon. The paper situates these strategies within debates about language choice, cultural authenticity, and the politics of world literature.

Keywords: Postcolonial literature, Achebe, Adichie, Rushdie, Roy, Stylistic Innovation
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Published: 30 DEC 2025

Issue: Oct-Dec (2025)

Section: Articles

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