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Chapter 11  Passionate Spaces: African Literature and the Post-
Colonial Context  Chapter 11 The historical novel Hear this for
the sound of it  Few would doubt that the relationship between
literature and society is a close and meaningful one. Equally it
is apparent that literary forms are never solely literary forms.
As Georg Lukacs has pointed out:  The genuine categories of
literary forms are not simply literary in essence. They are
forms of life especially adapted to the articulation of great
alternatives in a practical and effective manner and to the
exposition of the maximal inner potentialities of forces and
counter-forces.1  Each work of art arises out of the particular
alternatives of its time. In the modern African historical novel
the attempted dynamic rendering of these alternatives (by giving
a total picture of a society in motion) is an important
motivating formal principle. It is clear that African novelists
proceed from this principle