DISTINGUISHED CRITIC EUSTACE PALMER ALSO A NOVELIST

His novel:

Book: A Tale of Three Women

Author: Eustace Palmer

Publisher: Africa World Press

Eustace Palmer is world famous as one of the pioneer academic critics of African literature. His study An Introduction to the African novel (1972) has become a classic. A Sierra Leonean by birth, he has published one book on the English novel—Studies in the English Novel—and four on African literature: An Introduction to the African Novel; The Growth of the African Novel; Of War and Women, Oppression and Optimism: New Essays on the African Novel; and Knowledge Is More Than Mere Words: A Critical Introduction to Sierra Leonean Literature (jointly edited with Abioseh Michael Porter).

Palmer has also published over sixty articles on English and African literatures. For several years, he was Associate Editor of African Literature Today and was President of the African Literature Association from 2006 to 2007. A Tale of Three Women is his first published novel. He currently teaches at Georgia College & State University where he is Professor of English and Coordinator of Africana Studies.


Talking about his books in general, Professor Palmer has said:

“My first book...was An Introduction to the African Novel. That book was published by Heinemann over thirty years ago. It was a very personal book that was not meant to be a general introduction at all. Rather it was a critical account of twelve novels that I personally liked, by twelve different authors. I was not trying to establish any kind of canon; my intention was merely to give a critical account of twelve books that I found to my taste by twelve different authors. Inevitably, some were left out; this did not mean that they were not good books. At the time, not much had been written about the African novel and my work, to my surprise, instantly became something of a classic. However, it became obvious to me that I ought to write a more comprehensive account of the African novel, one that, among other things, discussed the achievement of each major novelist and that attempted to cover most of the concerns of the African novel. So about eight years later I published The Growth of the African Novel which, in my view, attempted to do just that. In that book, for instance, I discussed all the novels of Achebe, Aluko and Soyinka that had been written then, and I tried to arrange the authors in a roughly chronological order. It was therefore a more ambitious book than An Introduction to the African Novel. For my third book I went back to studying the English novel. I did so because I had been teaching English literature, including the English novel, at Fourah Bay College, and one of my students suggested in passing once that we should write more on the English novel to help them understand that genre. This resulted in Studies In the English Novel. This work was deliberately directed at African students studying the English novel at university and in the sixth forms of secondary schools in preparation for the GCE “A” level exams. I decided this time, therefore, to go for an African publisher, African Universities Press, then located in Ibadan, Nigeria. The book came out in 1986, and I must say that AUP did a good job with the production of the work, but unfortunately, up to this moment, I have not received a single cent from them in royalties, though I was told by a Nigerian colleague that the book was selling very well in Nigeria, especially since it was deliberately targeted for a special audience. The book was not even widely available in Sierra Leone. I even suggested to AUP, who had an office in Freetown, that they should send copies of the book to be sold in Freetown, and pay me my royalties in leones out of the proceeds. But this never happened. This is one handicap that African publishing has to overcome. We must try to introduce standards of integrity and professionalism into our publishing endeavors, the same kind of standards that Western writers have come to expect from their publishers. My next two books were published at about the same time here in the United States by Africa World Press in 2008. Knowledge Is More Than Mere Words is, as I have said, the first critical introduction to Sierra Leonean literature, and it was jointly edited by myself and Professor Abioseh Porter of Drexel university. Actually, I wrote the introduction and five of the fifteen chapters, about one third of the book. The other, Of War and Women, Oppression and Optimism, is entirely my own work, and attempts to bring my critical coverage of the African novel up to date and consider those trends in the development of the African novel that had taken place since the publication of The Growth of the African Novel. ...(Courtesy of the Patriotic Vanguard)