The third edition of Introduction To English Literary Studies, previously published as Selves and Others, is a guide on how to approach, engage with, and write about literature. Structured into chapters that deal with reading and writing, poetry, narrative, and drama, the book enables students to become successful critical readers of English literature.

The book offers an integrated, progressive introduction to the study of literature in English, creative writing, and literary genres. Critical literacy exercises help students engage with literary concepts and develop their thinking skills. Margin glosses explain difficult terms, while information boxes provide additional contextual information or pose self-reflective questions.

Introduction To English Literary Studies is written for university and university of technology students taking first-year courses in literature and creative writing. It is ideal for both face-to-face and distance education courses.

The 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 critical essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J.M. Coetzee, as well as writings on gender politics, race, identity, visual art, sexuality and a wide range of other cultural and political topics. Also included are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb.

In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insight on her nation’s history, policies, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and diversity and pluralism are the declared enemies of right-wing populist movements, her essays speak powerfully to a wide range of international issues.

Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi is one of South Africa’s most famous novels.

First published in 1930, it is the first full-length novel by a black South African writer, and is widely read and studied in South African schools, colleges and universities. It has been translated into a number of different languages. Written over 30 years before Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart, Mhudi is a pioneering African novel too, anticipating many of the themes with which Achebe and other writers from the African continent were concerned.

Mhudi has had a complicated history. Critics have been divided in their views, and there was a delay of ten years between the time Plaatje wrote the book and when it was published. A century on from when it was written, the time is now right to both celebrate its composition and to assess its meanings and legacy.

In this book, a distinguished cast of contributors explore the circumstances in which Mhudi was both written and published, what the critics have made of it, why it remains so relevant today. Chapters look at the eponymous feminist heroine of the novel and what she symbolizes, the role of history and oral tradition, the contentious question of language, the linguistic and stylistic choices that Plaatje made. In keeping with Mhudi’s capacity to inspire, this book also includes a poem and short story, specially written in order to pay tribute to both the book and its author.

South Africa in the 1970s was a divided and increasingly traumatised country, seemingly permanently in the toils of apartheid, and with little space available for open discussion of apartheid policies or awareness of just what those policies were meaning in the lives of people. It was in this context that David Philip, a South African already involved for several years in publishing, became convinced there must be more opportunity for books with informed discussion and debate to be written and published within the country.

He persuaded his wife Marie, also with publishing experience, that they could together set up their own independent publishing company, to publish 'Books that matter for Southern Africa'- in social history, politics, literature, or whatever, good of their kind and ready to challenge mainstream apartheid thinking.

This is an anecdotal account - a memoir - of the lows and highs of a small, cheerful, underfunded but vibrant 'oppositional' publishing company, David Philip Publishers, from the year 1971 through to the birth of the new South Africa.

“Let us, then, set off together on a series of journeys around South Africa with an old kitbag full of books instead of maps to guide us. Let us follow meandering paths through the landscapes of literature, and celebrate how local authors, characters and readers are shaped and inspired by place …”

In this gripping travelogue, Justin Fox goes on a one-of-a-kind journey. Marrying his love for travel and writing, he sets off to explore the places of his favourite books. From the mountainous eastern Karoo of Olive Schreiner to the big-game lowveld of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, from Deneys Reitz’s wide-open Cape interior to the bushveld of Eugène Marais’s Waterberg, Fox reveals the majestic power of place. Through the savannah of Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico, the dusty plains of JM Coetzee’s Moordenaars Karoo, the forests of Dalene Matthee’s Garden Route, the subtropical hamlets of Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast, and finally the sandstone crags of Stephen Watson’s Cederberg, he brings to life the settings we’ve only seen through characters’ eyes.

Place is a moving love letter to South Africa, merging literature and landscape, and taking the reader on a breath-taking journey – into the heart of South Africa’s spectacular landscape and the inner-worlds of its most celebrated authors.

This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa’s foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr’s path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world.

This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South’s leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities. Isabel Hofmeyr’s scholarship spans more than four decades, and its sustained and long-term influence on her discipline and beyond is formidable.

While much of the history of print cultures has been written primarily from the North, Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the leading thinkers producing new knowledge in this area from Africa, the Indian Ocean world and the global South. Her major contribution encompasses the history of the book as well as shorter textual forms and abridged iterations of canonical works such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. She has done pioneering research on the ways in which such printed matter moves across the globe, focusing on intra-African trajectories and circulations as well as movements across land and sea, port and shore.

The essays gathered here are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. Via their engagement with Hofmeyr’s path-breaking work, the essays in turn elaborate and contribute to studies of print culture as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating their findings from the point of view of global South historical contexts and textual practices.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature is at once a literary history, an introduction to various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, a review of genres, and a selection of original and interdisciplinary essays on canonical and popular works for children in the Anglo-American tradition. It is geared toward graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and scholars new to the study of children's literature, as well as teachers and anyone wishing to keep up with new research and innovative approaches to children's literature. Twenty-six essays by top scholars from varied disciplines address theoretical, historical, sociological, and critical issues through analyses of classic novels such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, The Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; early educational and religious works such as The New England Primer and Froggy's Little Brother; picture books, comics and graphic novels such as Millions of Cats, Where the Wild Things Are, the Peanuts series and American Born Chinese; early readers such as The Cat in the Hat and the Frog and Toad books; newer children's classics including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Jade, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Circuit, the Harry Potter series and His Dark Materials trilogy; works of poetry such as The Bat Poety and The Dreamkeeper; a play, Peter Pan; and media classics such as Free to Be You and Me and Dumbo. An editors' introduction surveys key trends in criticism, the field's history, and foundational scholarship.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

How to raise children to be moral, responsible, and productive citizens is one of the most debated issues in society today. In this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian argues that our most beloved fairy tales and classic and contemporary fantasy stories written for children have enormous power to awaken the moral imagination.

Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth - this most primal and malleable of forms. 'Translation' is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth's endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

This collection of original essays, written by scholars from disciplines across the humanities, addresses a wide range of questions about love through a focus on individual films, novels, plays, and works of philosophy. The essays touch on many varieties of love, including friendship, romantic love, parental love, and even the love of an author for her characters. How do social forces shape the types of love that can flourish and sustain themselves? What is the relationship between love and passion? Is love between human and nonhuman animals possible? What is the role of projection in love? These questions and more are explored through an investigation of works by authors ranging from Henrik Ibsen to Ian McEwan, from Rousseau to the Coen Brothers.

This book explores representations of fathers in select South African novels published from the birth of apartheid to the post-transitional moment.

Father figures in the texts reflect political and social climates in South Africa – at different times representing the oppressive apartheid government, righteous and authoritative liberation leaders and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic South Africa. Grant Andrews examines how father characters are linked to storytelling; they narrate the lives of their children and their patriarchal power is constituted through narratives. He features authors such as Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, K. Sello Duiker, Mark Behr, Zoë Wicomb, Lisa Fugard and Zukiswa Wanner.

Stories of Fathers, Stories of the Nation also investigates how fatherhoods are being reimagined in light of shifting discourses of gender and identity. More recent novels have deconstructed the father figure and his paternal narrative power, representing conflicts around racial identity, sexuality, legacy and how the sins of the father are visited on his children.