The African Novel and the Modernist Tradition challenges, from a literary perspective, the general thinking that what is European and American is uniquely different from what is African. The book examines key African novels side by side with British and American modernist novels. Through this comparative study, it demonstrates the manner in which several African novelists have taken full advantage of the experimentation that modernism offers to tackle their own 'crisis of culture'.

This study shows that African novelists clearly understand what modernism is and employ to advantage its consciousness of disorder, despair, and anarchy. The African Novel and the Modernist Tradition is thus able to conclude that the African novel is part of a larger fictional universe.