Myth is dramatic representation of a people’s fundamental and deepest instinctual life or cosmological perspective, which determines their opinions and attitudes in life. It is an embodiment of dogma and permeates the lives, attitudes, beliefs and values of the people who profess it.Yoruba creative writers have put myths to great advantage in recreating an authentic Yoruba world and experience. A critical study of the writing of Fagunwa, Tutuola, Soyinka, Osofison, Omotosho among others show how the natural is suffused with the preternatural in order to give meaning to a cosmic order and authenticate the mores, attitudes, beliefs, values and rituals that control the conduct and govern the faith of the Yoruba. Such archetypes, mythologies and extended configurations like the scape-goat carrier and journey motifs among others point to some authentic way of understanding the history and cosmology of the Yoruba. More so, the different temperaments- social and political persuasions- with which these writers approach and explore the same collective consciousness reveal strong majestic forms of dialogue that question the redundant and retrogressive possibilities in some Yoruba myths which retard the gains of self-assertion and circumscribe general human development. This paper intends to examine the worldhood of the Yoruba as well as their progressive socio-political vision through the windows of mythic figures and motifs recreated in their ethnic literature.

The inter-relationship among language, culture and identity is incontrovertible. Language expresses culture, and language (which is also culture) and culture are touchstones for locating a people’s identity. Similarly, literature, a linguistic recreation of society, life and experience can be used to study the societal norms and traditions of a people.Yoruba literature in English illustrates the features of contact literature in that it reflects the discoursal patterns, dominant linguistic codes, folklore and the stylistic echo of the Yoruba tradition and culture in a second language.There are linguistic, pragmatic and creative indices that mark off Yoruba literature in English as type and position of the Yoruba culture and identity. for instance there are Yoruba induced lexemes, deep and surface structure, collocation deviation, code mixing and code switching borrowing, relexification and genelexification, localized simile and metaphor, oral tradition, folklore and myths that betray the Yoruba culture, mode of interaction and cosmological perspective. It is the position of this paper that these idioms of feeling negotiation of meaning, thought patterns and cultural significations contrived in a second language implicate deep structure that convey authentic Yoruba world and experience and position their identity and ethnic core-values.