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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
In 1957 emigreer die negejarige Henk van Woerden vanaf Nederland met sy gesin na Kaapstad – leertas in die hand, mussie oor die ore, serp om die nek, glasoog in die oogkas. Eers veertig jaar later ontdek hy wat die rede was vir hierdie vertrek na Suid-Afrika: Sy pa was ’n kollaborateur in die Tweede Wêreldoorlog. Die emigrasie is die begin van ’n lewe as buitestaander en vorm later die goue draad in sy skilderye en literêre werk. Koning Eenoog is ’n boeiende biografie van die ewig soekende emigrant Henk van Woerden (1947–2005), ’n skrywer wat nie net ’n bekroonde oeuvre agtergelaat het nie (Een mond vol glas – Alan Paton Award en die Frans Kellendonk-prys, Ultramarijn – Gouden Uil en Inktaap) maar ook die Nederlandse literatuur oor Suid-Afrika verander het.
The lives of South Africans have always been interwoven in complex ways. There is a long history of division; but also of profound (and often surprising) instances of mutual recognition. Recognition is an exciting anthology of short stories in which twenty-two South African writers render these intricate connections. The writers whose stories have been selected use the transformative power of the imagination and the unique appeal of the short story to illuminate aspects of our past and present. Cumulatively their stories tell of a history tainted by misrecognition but not, finally, bound by it. Amongst the twenty-two contributors are some of our best-known short story writers: Pauline Smith, Herman Charles Bosman, H.I. E. Dhlomo, Can Themba, Nadine Gordimer, Alex La Guma, Dan Jacobson, Miriam Tlali, Ahmed Essop, Njabulo Ndebele, Mandla Langa, Chris van Wyk, Damon Galgut, Achmat Dangor and Zoe Wicomb. And there is also a selection of vibrant newer voices: Makhosazana Xaba, Nadia Davids, Mary Watson, Lindiwe Nkutha, Wamuwi Mbao and Kobus Moolman. Chronologically the collection ranges from the 1920s to the twenty first century. It builds on its predecessor, Encounters, but devotes significant attention to the transitional and post-apartheid years: almost half the stories were published after 1994. The anthology includes a generous and detailed introduction, written by David Medalie. It traces the motif of recognition, discusses the general characteristics of short stories and the narrative devices used by writers, and includes a brief analysis of each short story. Recognition will appeal to teachers and students of literature. It will be enjoyed by all those who love short stories and appreciate the craftsmanship involved in telling a memorable tale.
The first ever memoirs from the Number One global bestselling adventure author. Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction. Always candid, sometimes hilarious, and never less than thrillingly entertaining, On Leopard Rock is testament to a writer whose life is as rich and eventful as his novels are compellingly unputdownable.
Die Singende Hand: Versamelde Gedigte 1984 – 2014 is Breyten Breytenbach se derde versamelbundel. Dit vorm ’n drieluik met die vorige twee bande, Ysterkoei-Blues en Die Ongedanste Dans.
I Write What I Like features the writing of the famous activist and Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. Before his untimely death in detention at age 30, he was instrumental in uniting Black Africans in the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa. This 40th anniversary edition includes a foreword by Njabulo S. Ndebele, personal reflections on Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, as well as Biko’s first known published piece of writing. In addition, it features all the material of the original Picador Africa edition: a collection of Biko’s columns entitled I Write What I Like published in the journal of the South Africa Student Organisation under the pseudonym of ‘Frank Talk’; other journal articles, interviews and letters written by Steve Biko at the time; an Introduction by Nkosinathi Biko; a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and a moving memoir by Father Aelred Stubbs, which pays tribute to the courage and power of this young leader, who was to become one of Africa’s heroes.
What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.
Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King. Part memoir, part masterclass by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 - and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King's critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it - fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.
York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.
Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.
The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels, that is texts by African American writers focused almost exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s, these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about the nature of African American literature and the unique expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies. Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this particular racial construction is freighted with social power and narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans. Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in the White also provides important historical context to understand how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly integrated nation.
The greed, excess, and decadence of the long 1980s has been famously chronicled, critiqued, and satirized in epochal works like White Noise by Don DeLillo, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leigh Claire La Berge offers an in-depth study of these fictions alongside the key moments of financial history that inform them, contending that throughout the 1980s, novelists, journalists, and filmmakers began to reimagine the capitalist economy as one that was newly personal, masculine, and anxiety producing. The study's first half links the linguistic to the technological by exploring the arrival of ATMs and their ubiquity in postmodern American literature. In transformative readings of novels such as White Noise and American Psycho, La Berge traces how the ATM serves as a symbol of anxious isolation and the erosion of interpersonal communication. A subsequent chapter on Ellis' novel and Jane Smiley's Good Faith explores how male protagonists in each develop unique associations between money and masculinity. The second half of the monograph features chapters that attend to works-most notably Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities-that capture aspects of the arrogance and recklessness that led to the savings-and-loan crisis and the 1987 stock market crash. Concluding with a coda on the recent Occupy Wall Street Movement and four short stories written in its wake, Scandals and Abstraction demonstrates how economic forces continue to remain a powerful presence in today's fiction.
Taking its title from Faulkner's epochal modernist novel, David Sherman's study traces the myriad ways death and its effect on the living defined modernist fiction and verse in England, Ireland, and the U.S. A focus on the disturbing but recurring image of the corpse allows Sherman to consider a range of texts marked by their sense of mortal fragility. Wilfred Owen's war poetry and Virginia Woolf's early novel Jacob's Room illustrate an incipient anxiety over new governmental techniques for efficiently managing the burial of the dead during World War I. Joyce's Ulysses and As I Lay Dying offer opportunities to consider narratives organized by the problem of an unburied corpse. Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, which Eliot edited, demonstrate how modernist writers often respond to death and the loss of corporality with erotic encounters at the moment mortality is most threatened. Two poems by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, in the monograph's concluding section, provide emblems for competing attitudes toward the disposal of the dead in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, In a Strange Room presents a richly textured transatlantic study of a defining aspect of modernist literature and culture.
Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors-from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno- he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.
This intriguing study examines the truth behind the myths and misconceptions that defined the Roaring Twenties, as portrayed through the popular literary works of the time. This one-stop reference to the "Jazz Age"-the period that began after the First World War and ended with the stock market crash of 1929-digs into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era. Author Linda De Roche examines the writing of the time to look beyond the common conceptions of the Roaring Twenties and instead reflect on the era's complexities and contradictions, including how gender and race influenced social mores. The book profiles key American literature of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Sinclair Lewis's Babbit, Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Nella Larsen's Passing. Filled with essays that offer historical explorations of each work as well as suggested learning activities, chapters also feature study questions, primary source documents, and chronologies. Support materials include activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, topics for further research, and suggested readings. Outlines key events and developments and provides context for the historical period and work Aligns with Common Core standards in English language arts and social studies Discusses five major writers of the Jazz Age Provides numerous suggestions for class activities and further individual exploration Supplies educators with ready reference work that aligns with Common Core Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) in Social Studies Gives readers insight into how literature and other art forms reflect the social conditions and are inspired by events of the time
The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.
This books provides students with an introduction to the work of Ian McEwan that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores his biography and his hallmark literary techniques, and it looks at the issues of ethics and representation, focusing particularly on his most recent fiction. Including a timeline of key dates and an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of McEwan's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.
The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily sensitive human being, he relished the beauty of images and the community they could bring together.
Kafka's novel The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multi-faceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism, and one of the most emblematic books of the 20th Century. It tells the story of Josef K., a man accused of a crime he has no recollection of committing and whose nature is never revealed to him. The novel is often interpreted theologically as an expression of radical nihilism and a world abandoned by God. It is also read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero searches for truth and clarity (whether about himself, or the anonymous system he is facing), only to fall into greater and greater confusion. This collection of nine new essays and an editor's introduction brings together Kafka experts, intellectual historians, literary scholars, and philosophers in order to explore the novel's philosophical and theological significance. Authors pursue the novel's central concerns of justice, law, resistance, ethics, alienation, and subjectivity. Few novels display human uncertainty and skepticism in the face of rapid modernization, or the metaphysical as it intersects with the most mundane aspects of everyday life, more insistently than The Trial. Ultimately, the essays in this collection focus on how Kafka's text is in fact philosophical in the ways in which it achieves its literary aims. Rather than considering ideas as externally related to the text, the text is considered philosophical at the very level of literary form and technique.
A perfect guide for use in high school classes, this book explores the fascinating literature of the Harlem Renaissance, reviewing classic works in the context of the history, society, and culture of its time. The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most interesting eras in African American literature as well as a highly regarded period in our country's literary history. The works produced during this span reflect a turbulent social climate in America ... a time fraught with both opportunities and injustices for minorities. In this enlightening guide, author and educator Lynn Domina examines the literature of the Harlem Renaissance along with the cultural and societal factors influencing its writers. This compelling book illuminates the cultural conditions affecting the lives of African Americans everywhere, addressing topics such as prohibition, race riots, racism, interracial marriage, sharecropping, and lynching. Each chapter includes historical background on both the literary work and the author and explores several themes through historical document excerpts and thoughtful analysis to illustrate how literature responded to the surrounding social circumstances. Chapters conclude with a discussion of why and how the literary work remains relevant today. Discusses five major writers of the Harlem Renaissance Provides numerous suggestions for class activities and further individual exploration Supplies educators with ready reference work that aligns with Common Core Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) in Social Studies Gives readers insight into how literature and other art forms reflect the social conditions and are inspired by events of the time
We are still a long way from knowing how to read the rhythms of free verse, a poetry which has been largely neglected by metrical theory. Clive Scott's readable and scholarly study indicates the strategies of reading needed if justice is to be done to free verse's rhythmic versatility. The core of Reading the Rhythm is an analysis of key French twentieth-century poets and poems, including Perse's Eloges, Cendrars's Prose du Transsiberien, Dix-neuf poemes elastiques, and Documentaires; Apollinaire's Calligrammes; Supervielle's Gravitations; and Reverdy's Sources de vent. Contemporary trends in the visual arts - Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, photography - are called upon as perceptual models to illuminate free verse and a further perspective is added by the theme of travel and movement. This is an accomplished examination of the rhythms of free verse, and of its implications for our reading of regular verse. It is also a significant study of modernist poetics.
"The Library of Babel" is arguably Jorge Luis Borges' best known
story--memorialized along with Borges on an Argentine postage
stamp. Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of
Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour
of the mathematical ideas hidden within one of the classic works of
modern literature.
Repetition and Race explores the literary forms and critical frameworks occasioned by the widespread institutionalization of liberal multiculturalism by turning to the exemplary case of Asian American literature. Whether beheld as "model minorities" or objects of "racist love," Asian Americans have long inhabited the uneasy terrain of institutional embrace that characterizes the official antiracism of our contemporary moment. Repetition and Race argues that Asian American literature registers and responds to this historical context through formal structures of repetition. Forwarding a new, dialectical conception of repetition that draws together progress and return, motion and stasis, agency and subjection, creativity and compulsion, this book reinterprets the political grammar of four forms of repetition central to minority discourse: trauma, pastiche, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity. Working against narratives of multicultural triumph, the book shows how texts by Theresa Cha, Susan Choi, Karen Tei Yamashita, Chang-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston use structures of repetition to foreground moments of social and aesthetic impasse, suspension, or hesitation rather than instances of reversal or resolution. Reading Asian American texts for the way they allegorize and negotiate, rather than resolve, key tensions animating Asian American culture, Repetition and Race maps both the penetrating reach of liberal multiculturalism's disciplinary formations and an expanded field of cultural politics for minority literature.
A portrait of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, fighting for his work and his life in a society riven with fear of Stalin's tyranny Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891. He started as a career writing articles and satiric short stories about the revolution and the economic reconstruction in the young Soviet state. He drew on these writings in many of his stage plays which brought him into conflict with the authorities. He died in 1940.
In this perceptive and original study of one of the most popular of English poets, Douglas Kerr has written the life of Wilfred Owen's language. The book explores the meaning in Owen's life of the family, the Church, the army, and English poets of the past. It examines the language of these four communities, and shows how their discourses helped to mould the poet's own. The language in which Owen's extraordinary poems and letters are written was learned in and from these communities which shaped his short career. But there were times too when he hated each of them. As Douglas Kerr shows, much of the power of Owen's writing derives from his desire to transform the communities which formed him. Accessible and lucid, and informed by the insights of recent theory, Wilfred Owen's Voices throws important new light on the best-known of the English war poets, and on both the cultural history and intense personal drama to be read in his work. |
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