...formalism ... allows Harrow to enter the heart of texts, as it were, to produce many original-and often brilliant-interpretations of African literature.... As the first sustained formalistic and deconstructive study of African literature, this study seems to be charting new grounds even when the subject of analysis has been analyzed to death in previous studies.
—Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan

African literature in the twentieth century has grown from the early poetry of Negritude to recent novels of magical realism. As novelists, poets, and playwrights testified to the unique qualities of their lives and societies, a new tradition began to emerge. Novels of testimony, novels of revolt, novels of struggle, followed by post-colonial writings, filled with complexities and ambiguities, have created a literary tradition expressive of the African spirit—a tradition influenced by earlier African oral literature, by European writings, by changing social conditions, and increasingly by African writings themselves. Thresholds of Change in African Literature explores the emergence of this tradition, and particularly the ways in which the emergent literature changed at each critical stage