Abstract
In the early 1970s, Buchi Emecheta is the first female novelist of African descent to explore the experiences of a Black woman in post-war Britain. Her autobiographically-inspired debut In the Ditch (1972) and its prequel Second Class Citizen (1974), published in a single volume as Adah’s Story (1983), have been praised especially for their gendered insider’s perspective on the demographic diversification of early post-Windrush Britain. This chapter seeks to contribute to an aesthetic turn in Black British literary criticism by showing how Emecheta also transformed established literary genres (the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman, the romance novel, and the London novel) and thus paved the way for the bolder experiments of later Black British writers at a time when Black literature in Britain was still largely invisible.
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Bekers, E. (2021). Experimenting in the Ditch: Buchi Emecheta’s Early Novels of Transformation. In: Radford, A., Van Hove, H. (eds) British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72766-6_12
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