Stylistic Perspectives on Military Dictatorship in Nigeria in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel Novel

This paper explores the linguistic stylistic devices employed by Helon Habila in Waiting for an Angel to depict the era of military dictatorship in Nigeria. The study adopts the theory of New Historicism as its framework and Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as a grammatical model to examine the influence of language choice on meaning. New Historicism situates the novel under study in its historical moment and examines the political turmoil of Nigeria's unprecedented military era in the 1980s and late 1990s. The study uses Systemic Functional Grammar for meaning-making and to show the three meta-functions of language: ideational, interpersonal, and textual.