Setting in the African Literary Autobiography

Abstract

This essay examines aspects of setting - place, time, social context of characters - and the atmosphere, which includes mood, feeling and emotion that they generate in selected African autobiographies noted for their artistry and argues that the autobiographers, through the use of such means as shift in time frames, symbolized and naturalistic descriptions are able effectively to render and re-create the setting in their autobiographies, stressing that such rendering and re-creation enable them to transmute an ordinary experience into fantasy. Setting is a vital part of the autobiographies as literary works, the essay concludes.