“". . . a book that will break new ground in African cultural studies. . . . [it] will appeal not only to literary scholars but also to social historians and cultural anthropologists." —Karin Barber " . . . conceptually innovative, and promises to be a very important contribution to African and Postcolonial studies as a whole." —Lyn Innes Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana offers a unique perspective on who was reading in English in colonial Ghana, what they were reading, and what values were associated with literacy, reading practices, and reading cultures.”

“A prolific writer on African literature, Newell (African studies, Cambridge Univ., UK) offers rich insights into the changing educational values of mission societies and the administration in colonial Ghana. Using government, newspaper, and mission archives, she argues that literate Africans used a wide variety of English-language texts, both foreign and domestic, to meet their own needs and help set standards for Ghanaian English, to develop an indigenous set of aesthetic values, and to shape new moral principles. Although she devotes chapters to several well-known colonial writers—e.g., Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi—she emphasizes the cultural influence of nonelite readers who began to emerge in the 1920s. Her discussion of these early readers (mostly young men) and how they formed literary social clubs patterned after elite literary clubs established by the first generation of professional elites around the turn of the 20th century is one of the highlights of the book. A follow up to the author's Ghanaian Popular Fiction (2000), which examined Ghanaian popular fiction since the 1930s, this book brings new perspectives to readers' understanding of the dynamics of colonial literary history and its influence on postcolonial Ghanaian culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic collections; large public collections.March 2003”
 — C. Pike, University of Minnesota

“By digging into the roots of Ghana's literary culture, and especially by tracing their growth within the rich soil of shifting gender and status relations, Newell reveals how much more satisfying and multidimensional our grasp of modern African history can become.”
 — International Journal of African Historical Studies