Andrew van der Vlies - Böcker

Present Imperfect asks how South African writers have responded to the end of apartheid, to the hopes that attended the birth of the 'new' nation in 1994, and to the inevitable disappointments that have followed. The first full-length study of affect in South Africa's literature, it understands 'disappointment' both as a description of bad feeling and as naming a missed appointment with all that was promised by the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid Struggle (a dis-appointment). Attending to contemporary writers' treatment of temporality, genre, and form, it considers a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture-including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Present Imperfect offers close readings of work by a range of writers - some known to international Anglophone readers including J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavic, and Zoë Wicomb, some slightly less well-known including Afrikaans-language novelists Marlene van Niekerk and Ingrid Winterbach, and others from a new generation including Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. It addresses key questions in South African studies about the evolving character of the historical period in which the country now finds itself. It is also alert to wider critical and theoretical conversations, looking outward to make a case for the place of South African writing in global conversations, and mobilizing readings of writing marked in various ways as 'South African' in order to complicate the contours of World Literature as category, discipline, and pedagogy. It is thus also a book about the discontents of neoliberalism, the political energies of reading, and the fates of literature in our troubled present.

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South AfricaThe most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa’s leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as on a wide range of cultural and political topics, including gender politics, sexuality, race, identity, nationalism, and visual art. Also presented here are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insights into her nation’s history, politics, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and right-wing populist movements are the declared enemies of diversity and pluralism, her essays speak powerfully to a host of current international issues.

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. The book is absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in the fields of South African, African, and general colonial and postcolonial literatures and history, as well as those with an interest print and media cultures, and the History of the Book.

This book presents a clearly written introduction to the novel's themes and form, inspired by the author's practical experience of several years of teaching the novel at university level in Britain, as well as his background as a South African-born and educated academic. One of the most widely read novels by a South African-born writer or 'about' South Africa, Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's (second) Booker Prize-winning novel, "Disgrace" (1999), is a firm favourite with reading groups and a fixture on many university-level courses on postcolonial or international literatures in English. Sometimes regarded as offering a bleak picture of post-apartheid South Africa, "Disgrace" has also been read as an ultimately hopeful novel about renunciation and redemption. This introduction offers an indispensable guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century.Offering an overview of the author's career, informed discussion of the novel's setting and references, this guide considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory. It provides a discussion of the novel's critical and popular reception, a comprehensive guide to further reading, and questions for discussion.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid?Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country’s literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.

J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work.The volume covers a wealth of topics, including:· The full span of Coetzee’s work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels· Biographical details and archival approaches· Coetzee’s sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures· Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation. The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid?Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country’s literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.

J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work.The volume covers a wealth of topics, including:· The full span of Coetzee’s work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels· Biographical details and archival approaches· Coetzee’s sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures· Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation. The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.

Examines Olive Schreiner's writing, networks and legacies in new global, historical and contemporary contextsExamines aspects of Schreiner's radical thought, including her feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, pacifism, environmentalism, and ambivalent anarchism, as well as their impacts on civil rights movements, global feminisms, and global literary modernismsExplores revealing and sometimes unexpected connections, affinities and lines of influence that link Schreiner's work with its widespread influence and afterlifeIncludes essays by leading and emerging Schreiner scholars working across English Studies, Modernist Studies, Comparative Literature, Sociology, Museum Studies, Publishing HistoryDiscusses Schreiner's work in relation to major global literary and historical figures including W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr, Charles Freer Andrews, J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf, Bessie Head and Patrick White, amongst othersChapters are driven by a shared impetus to uncover and analyse the anticipatory and galvanising roles of political and artistic forces that emerge from Southern Africa through case studies on SchreinerThis collection of essays considers the significance of South African-born writer, activist and thinker Olive Schreiner in international and multidisciplinary contexts in her time and the ongoing relevance of her work to our own. A leading writer of New Woman Fiction at the fin de si cle, Schreiner influenced generations of readers, not to mention other writers. Taken together, these essays make the argument for a 'new' Schreiner Studies drawing on recent developments in scholarship on global and peripheral modernisms, activist networks and intersectionality, posthumanism, memory studies and intermediality. They position Schreiner's work and legacy as significant for understanding literary and social archives, race and gender performance, and the rise of literary modernism in the global Anglosphere.

This collection of essays considers the significance of South African-born writer, activist and thinker Olive Schreiner in international and multidisciplinary contexts in her time and the ongoing relevance of her work to our own. A leading writer of New Woman Fiction at the fin de siecle, Schreiner influenced generations of readers, not to mention other writers. Taken together, these essays make the argument for a 'new' Schreiner Studies drawing on recent developments in scholarship on global and peripheral modernisms, activist networks and intersectionality, posthumanism, memory studies and intermediality. They position Schreiner's work and legacy as significant for understanding literary and social archives, race and gender performance, and the rise of literary modernism in the global Anglosphere.