South African Literature's Russian Soul Narrative Forms of Global Isolation

by Jackson, Jeanne-Marie; Cheyette, Bryan; Boxall, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781472592996
• ISBN10: 1472592999
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-10-22
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature's Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing's “Golden Age” in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as a model for South African writers both during and after apartheid. Exploring these two isolated literary cultures alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

1. Introduction. Russia in the South African Imaginary



2. The Novel at a Crossroads: Gordimer, Tlali, & the Struggle for Form

I. Testing Trans-Century Parallels

II. Gordimer's Effacement by Narration

III. The Path of Progress in Miriam Tlali's Amandla

3. Making Animals Work in Tolstoy, Coetzee, and Van Niekerk

I. Dismantling Tolstoy's Strider

II. Coetzee's Action of Absence

III. Enduring Isolation in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf

4. Retreating Reality: Chekhov's South African Afterlives

I. Structuring Chekhovian Timelessness

II. De Wet's Self-Disabling Response

III. The Risky Business of Canonical Affirmation

5. Émigré Fiction and the Double-Bind of Home

I. Permeable Repossessions and Nabokov's Speak, Memory

II. Mark Behr's Not-Quite-Global Novel

III. Nkosi's Mandela's Ego as Ambivalent Mourning



6. Epilogue.

Works Cited

Index