This thesis refers to three widely separate geographical regions: West Africa, the Caribbean and Melanesia. The writers whose work has been selected for close study came from six of the nations within those regions: Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Papua New Guinea. Each writer is related by birth and experience to at least one of the many different ethnolinguistic groups contained in those nations. For the most part analyses and judgements of the qualities of particular styles are confined to the novels and stories which contain them. Some comparisons are made, usually within a single Part, in an effort to determine similarities and differences in the stylistic responses of different writers to similar linguistic or aesthetic factors. No attempt is made to generalize beyond this level for, though the problems of linguistic diversity which have confronted the selected writers are comparable, the range and variety of their responses to them are too great to compress into any definition of a new stylistic tradition.