Description
Book SynopsisThis is a study of the local and global networks which affected the publication, promotion, and reception of a series of key 'South African' writers and their works between 1883 and 2005 (Olive Schreiner, Roy Campbell, William Plomer, Alan Paton, Alex La Guma, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda), and asking why their work was construed as 'South Africa'
Trade ReviewSouth African textual cultures is a wide-ranging study that traces out the ‘biographies’ of a number of important books (from Story of an African Farm to The Heart of Redness) on their journeys across national boundaries and through different historical moments. It is not enough, nor entirely accurate, to say that this is an important contribution to South African literary studies: South African textual cultures is, rather, the first major study to question the very category of ‘South African literature’ and to describe the process of its construction in a sustained, engaging, theoretically astute manner.
Meticulously researched and eloquently argued, this book brings fresh perspectives to the study of South African - and African - literature, making detailed use of publishers’ archives and newspaper reviews to analyse the discourses and cultural networks in which literary texts are immersed. Van der Vlies usefully problematises the categories of the ‘global’ and the ‘national,’ and he draws attention to the diverse interpretive contexts in which anglophone South African literature is immersed. This book will provide inspiration to students and researchers, offering a methodology and a new set of questions for the study of postcolonial literatures.
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Table of ContentsList of plates and figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. South African textual cultures
2. Farming stories (I): Olive Schreiner’s fates
3. ‘Hurled by what aim to what tremendous range’: Roy Campbell, William Plomer, & the politics of reputation
4. Whose Beloved Country? Alan Paton and the hypercanonical
5. Alex La Guma’s marginal aesthetics and the institutions of protest
6. Farming Stories (II): J. M. Coetzee & the (heart of a) country
7. Zakes Mda’s novel educations
Afterword: white(s) and black(s), read all over
Bibliography
Index
