@article{Chepkwony_Goro_2025, title={Unearthing the Gothic Features in Kenya’s Selected Oral Narratives}, volume={10}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.102.34}, DOI={10.22161/ijels.102.34}, abstractNote={<jats:p>This study locates Gothic topoi in African oral literature as a way of embodying and evoking social cultural complexities and anxieties inherent in postmodern societies. Elements of giants, monsters, magicality and superstition make oral literature a rich literary mine for excavating Gothic elements and mechanics that animate the oral literary topography. Gothic traditions have been associated with written literature since the inception of Gothic genre in the sixteenth century, and this is regarded as the hegemonic normative ideological perspective which this study challenges and disrupts. Of import is the connection between oral narrative strand and Gothic genre in the overall aesthetic framework of Gothic terror, amalgamation of phantasmagoria and physical realm and naturalization of magicality. This paper concentrates its focus on the Gothic elements located in oral narratives within African setting. As an exemplification of Gothic nuances inhabiting African oral literature, the paper explores how oral narratives cross socially accepted limits allowing the monsters to become embodiment of the Other: anger, savagism, irrationality and sentimentalism reflecting on postmodern terror and horror. This work employs the theoretical arguments of Gothic-postmodernism as propagated by Maria Beville with the representational premise that selected oral narratives elucidate a Gothic space of literary inter-locution. This paper employs a closed library based document analysis of oral narratives and other seminal secondary works to explore ways in which Gothic topoi are embedded in oral narratives; buttressing the notion that meaning of a text is never fixed. The study is motivated by a paucity of serious critical works on Gothic fiction in oral literature that invoke phantasmagoria and use it as a crux to navigate the reading of postmodern life. The scope of this study was selected Kenya’s oral narratives that were purposefully selected using purposive sampling. In essence this helps to fortify Africa’s Gothic postmodernism; thus, dismantling the essentialist hegemonic Gothic traditions as only consigned to written artistic works. It roots for the establishment of Africa’s Gothic-postmodern tradition. Conclusions drawn will make significant contribution to the dialectics surrounding Gothic-postmodern genre in Kenya’s oral literature.</jats:p>}, number={2}, journal={International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences}, publisher={AI Publications}, author={Chepkwony, Dr. Julius Kipkorir A. and Goro, Prof. Nicholas Kamau}, year={2025}, pages={202–208} }