Comparative study on African and Slavic folklores in literature: A case study of Amos Tutuola and Nikolai Gogol

This study investigates the depiction of African and Slavic supernatural lore in Amos Tutuola's literary oeuvre and Nikolai Gogol's Ukrainian tales. Advancing the study of literature in the service of society, and examining how this advancement helps to foreground and extend debates such as racism and nationalism, I explore how the reading community of literature derives meaning from the text as though it were an ethnographic resource. In the light of this proposition, the thesis compares how the two writers in question represent folk belief in the supernatural.;The approach to this study takes three forms: (1) the textual analysis of the works of these writers; (2) the reader-reception of folk elements in the texts; (3) and the theoretical explanation of the outcome of the reader-response project. At the heart of my theoretical reading is the adoption and application of Noam Chomsky's linguistic notion of the deep and surface structure for the analysis of folklore in literature. Also, I balance this with a critical evaluation of phenomenological and empiricist approaches to the reading of cultural texts.