The Columbia Guide to South African literature in English since 1945 Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie This guide captures the pulsating diversity of South African literature in English since 1945 in a single volume, with a strong range of entries, richness of detail and critical sophistication. With some 400 entries on post-1945 writers, and a particular emphasis on writers emerging in the last 20 years or so, it is both comprehensive and concise on major writers and themes, and provides key background information on major historical and cultural events. The introduction provides a context for the entries, which include emerging writers, major post-1945 writers, and detailed subject entries. An appendix on some 30 essential pre-1945 writers ensures that the literary history is presented in a balanced way. The guide concludes with an extensive bibliography including primary works, critical literature, and anthologies, as well as a detailed index. From Afrika to Zwi, with Baderoon, Coovadia, and Duiker in between - not to mention Essop, Fugard, Galgut, Head, Jensma, Kozain, La Guma, Magona, Ndebele, Oliphant, Paton, Rampolokeng, Slovo, Themba, Uys, VladislaviÃ?Â, Wicomb, Zadok . . . this is the indispensible guide to South African literature in English.

This book is a critical study of South African literature, from colonial and pre-colonial times onwards. Christopher Heywood discusses selected poems, plays and prose works in five literary traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. The discussion includes over 100 authors and selected works, including poets from Mqhayi, Marais and Campbell to Butler, Serote and Krog, theatre writers from Boniface and Black to Fugard and Mda, and fiction writers from Schreiner and Plaatje to Bessie Head and the Nobel prizewinners Gordimer and Coetzee. The literature is explored in the setting of crises leading to the formation of modern South Africa, notably the rise and fall of the Emperor Shaka's Zulu kingdom, the Colenso crisis, industrialisation, the colonial and post-colonial wars of 1899, 1914, and 1939, and the dissolution of apartheid society. In Heywood's study, South African literature emerges as among the great literatures of the modern world.

With the release of Nelson Mandela, the advent of nonracial democracy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africans have found themselves grappling with the legacy of apartheid's racial and cultural divisions. Together with Claudia Bathsheba Braude's path-breaking introduction, the stories collected in this anthology tap silences that were central to apartheid rule and that have particular resonances for South African Jewish history and memory. ø Bringing together the best and most noteworthy of a wide range of contemporary writers who represent the historical specificities and contradictions of South African Jewish life under apartheid, Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa makes compellingly clear the depths and complexities of a society in which racial identities, including Jewish whiteness, were deliberately constructed. The contributors include Nobel Prize?winning novelist Nadine Gordimer; well-known writers such as Rose Zwi and Dan Jacobson; exiled ANC activist and constitutional court judge Albie Sachs; satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, a penetrating critic of apartheid; and actor and writer Matthew Krouse, whose fiction offers a provocative blending of gay and Jewish identities in the postapartheid era. ø The volume traces the construction of memory and racial identity in South African Jewish literary and cultural history. Among the recurring themes in these stories are the selective presentation of certain aspects of Jewish life under apartheid, a reevaluation of identity after its fall, and the conflicting shadow of the Holocaust in a white supremacist society. Giving nuanced voice to questions about history, race, and ethnicity in postapartheid South Africa, these stories will be of broad interest.

Provides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid, and contributes to key debates in South African history, gender inequality, sexual violence, and the legacies of the liberation struggle.

South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

In our globalised world, literature is less and less confined to national spaces. Europe-centred frameworks for literary studies have become insufficient; academics are increasingly called upon to address matters of cultural difference. In this unique volume, leading scholars discuss the critical and methodical challenges that these developments pose to the writing of literary history. What is the object of literary history? What is the meaning of the term “world literature”? How do we compare different cultural systems of genres? How do we account theoretically for literary transculturation? What are the implications of postcolonial studies for the discipline of comparative literature? Ranging in focus from the Persian epic of Majnun Layla and Zulu praise poetry to South Korean novels and Brazilian antropofagismo, the essays offer a concise overview of these and related questions. Their aim is not to reach a consensus on these matters. They show instead what is at stake in the emergent field of global comparatism.

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.

A study of the use of history as political ammunition and literature as historical counter-discourse in Mongane Serote's "Gods of Our Time", Mike Nicol's "The Ibis Tapestry", and Zakes Mda's "Ways of Dying". Moslund shows how literary engagement with the past seeks to rupture the continuity of a strongly dichotomised epistemology and through that dissolve the inherited polarisation of society. Falsification of history is exposed as constructed discourse and past simplifications of reality as sharply demarcated into homogenous self-justifying, categorisations of, Us against Them, are challenged with paradox, doubt and introspection.