South African textual cultures
White, black, read all overAndrew van der Vlies
"This is a pathbreaking book. [....] This interdisciplinary research establishes van der Vlies as a first rate literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist"
Laura Chrisman, SHARP News (August 2009)
"'South African Textual Cultures' is a significant addition to the field of postcolonial studies, and at the same time is informative and enabling. Heavily engaged with the political machinations of these developments and freighted with rigorous archival evidence, van der Vlies’ study is a model of scholarly rigour and will, one hopes, beget similar projects in other postcolonial contexts"
Eóin Flannery, Journal of Southern African Studies (June 2009)
"'South African Textual Cultures' is exemplary. Grounded in empirical research..., it is a thorough application of book history’s core methodologies. It also provides extensive evidence for one of its chief pieties: never stable, the meaning and value of texts shift with diverse readerships’ invested responses to particular circumstances. ... Though it presents itself as partial accounts of moments within a multivalent transnational history, readers of this study will come away with a sense of the overarching political horizons that have framed the region’s literary production, from Olive Schreiner’s 'The Story of an African Farm' (1883) to the post-apartheid novels of Zakes Mda"
Sarah Brouillette, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (November 2008)
"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"
Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania
'Nation’ and 'literature’ are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005, asking: who published what, where, why, and how; how and why work was construed as ‘South African’, what this meant, and how it affected reading. Exploring new approaches to studying colonial and postcolonial print cultures, it seeks to redress inadequately historicised or transnationally situated studies of South African writing in English.
In addition to making considerable contributions to the study of well-known writers like Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee (chapters on the early publication history of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, Paton’s globally influential Cry, the Beloved Country, and Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, his second novel but the first to be published abroad), it also includes discussions of the contrasting reputations of poets Roy Campbell and William Plomer in the 1920s and 1930s, of exiled ANC-activist Alex La Guma’s publishing odyssey (in Nigeria, East Germany and Britain); and Zakes Mda’s novel about hybrid identities and identifications in colonial and in post-'apartheid' South Africa, The Heart of Redness (2000).
Contents
List 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
Andrew van der Vlies is lecturer in postcolonial literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
234x156mm 256pp
hb 9780719076145 01 December 2007 £55.00
2 colour and 14 b&w illustrations
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