South African Literature's Russian Soul

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Assistant Professor of World Anglophone literature at Johns Hopkins University, USA.

Jackson’s South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation [is] well researched and well informed in the relevant scholarship areas for her study, be it Russian Literature, South African Literature, or Literary Theory on the novel from nineteenth-century realism to contemporary theories on the novel. Her ideas are lucidly expressed and corroborated with relevant textual evidence … Scholars in the related fields of African Literature, Russian Literature, Contemporary Literature, Comparative Literature, World Literature, Literary Theory, and Global Studies will find South African Literature’s Russian Soul a valuable acquisition.

• 1. Introduction. Russia in the South African Imaginary 2. The Novel at a Crossroads: Gordimer, Tlali, & the Struggle for FormI. Testing Trans-Century Parallels II. Gordimer’s Effacement by NarrationIII. The Path of Progress in Miriam Tlali’s Amandla3. Making Animals Work in Tolstoy, Coetzee, and Van NiekerkI. Dismantling Tolstoy’s StriderII. Coetzee’s Action of AbsenceIII. Enduring Isolation in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf 4. Retreating Reality: Chekhov’s South African AfterlivesI. Structuring Chekhovian TimelessnessII. De Wet’s Self-Disabling ResponseIII. The Risky Business of Canonical Affirmation 5. Émigré Fiction and the Double-Bind of HomeI. Permeable Repossessions and Nabokov’s Speak, MemoryII. Mark Behr’s Not-Quite-Global NovelIII. Nkosi’s Mandela’s Ego as Ambivalent Mourning 6. Epilogue. Works Cited Index