Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Telling Stories
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied auth...
Postcolonizing the Commonwealth
Women and resistance in Iran; cowboy songs; fetal alcohol syndrome; the conquest of Everest; women settlers in Natal. What do these topics have in common? The study of what used to be called Commonwealth literature, or the new literatures, has by now come to be known as postcolonial study. This collection of essays investigates the status of postcolonial studies today. The contributors come from three generations: the pioneers who introduced study of the “new” literatures into university English departments, the next generation who refined and developed many of the theoretical positions embodied in postcolonial study, and the next, much younger, generation, who use the established practi...
The Short Story after Apartheid
The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.
A.k.a. Breyten Breytenbach
The essays in this volume hold up for scrutiny, in diverse ways, many facets of the artistic output of Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet who first became a public figure in apartheid South Africa - his poetry, his fictional and non-fictional prose, his plays, and his painting and drawing. The approaches adopted by the authors of the essays range from the largely theoretical to the more popular forms of the interview and the review. Collectively, they represent a kaleidoscope of approaches, viewpoints and foci; their various critical and analytical colorations make up a timely statement about the centrality of this important artist's creativity, engagement, 'exile' and belongness to a land once impacting under its own contradictions and now experiencing an efflorescence that still harbours the paradoxes that Breytenbach's protean craft uncompromisingly anatomizes. Contributors are: Ampie Coetzee, J.M. Coetzee, Judith Lütge Coullie, Ileana Dimitriu, J.U. Jacobs, Tim Trengove, Jones, Erhard Reckwitz, Sandra Saayman, Marilet Sienaert, Lisbe Smuts, Louise Viljoen, Andries Visagie.
East Meets West
The 13th International Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, held at Biwako in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, in the summer of 2010, fully maintained the tradition established in this long-running conference series of bringing together scholars from many countries and many fields of specialisation. Although the conferences have taken place in widely scattered locations, this was the first to be held in an Asian country; and the opportunity this presented of focusing on the cultural links between East and West was taken up enthusiastically by the participants. Several of the papers explore aspects, sometimes unexpected, of the cultural cross-fertilisation between Japan, or the Orient in general, and the national literatures of the West. Others concentrate on iconic figures from regions of the English-speaking world with strongly-developed individual literary traditions. All the papers have been peer-reviewed, and extensively revised in order to maximise their impact in the written word. The collection demonstrates the stimulating effect of cross-cultural interaction in the field of literary studies of East and West.
South Africa's Renegade Reels
Despite incredible political upheavals and a minimal national history of film production, movies such as Come Back, Africa (1959), uDeliwe (1975), and Fools (1998) have taken on an iconic status within South African culture. In this much-needed study, author Litheko Modisane delves into the public critical engagements around old 'renegade' films and newer ones, revealing instructive details both in the production and the public lives of South African movies oriented around black social experiences. This illuminates the complex nature of cinema in modern public life, enriching established methodologies by expanding the cultural and conceptual boundaries of film as a phenomenon of textual circulation.
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression
This book is about the metanarrative and metafictional elements of J. M. Coetzee’s novels. It draws together authorship, readership, ethics, and formal analysis into one overarching argument about how narratives work the boundary between art and life. On the basis of Coetzee’s writing, it reconsiders the concept of metalepsis, challenges common understandings of self-reflexive discourse, and invites us to rethink our practice as critics and readers. This study analyzes Coetzee’s novels in three chapters organized thematically around the author’s relation with character, reader, and self. Author and character are discussed on the basis of Foe, Slow Man, and Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, 'He and His Man'. Stories featuring the character Elizabeth Costello, or the figuration Elizabeth Curren, serve to elaborate the relation of author and reader. The study ends on a reading of Summertime, Diary of a Bad Year, and Dusklands as Coetzee’s engagement with autobiographical writing, analyzing the relation of author and self. It will appeal to readers with an interest in literary and narrative theory as much as to Coetzee scholars and advanced students.
Postcolonial Gateways and Walls
This collection of essays focuses on the evocative figures of the ‘gateway’ and the ‘wall’ – both literal and metaphorical – to reflect on the state of postcolonial studies, a dynamic discipline that may itself be seen as permanently ‘under construction’.
New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
As ecofeminism continues to gain attention from multiple academic discourses, the field of literary criticism has been especially affected by this philosophy/social movement. Scholars using ecofeminist literary criticism are making new and important arguments concerning literature across the spectrum and issues of environment, race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of oppression. The essays in New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism highlight the intersections of these oppressions through the works of different authors including Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Hogan and Flora Nwapa, and demonstrate the expansion of ecofeminist literary criticism to a more global scale as well as important connections with the field of environmental justice. This collection offers fresh insight and expands the important discussion surrounding the field of ecofeminism and literature.
Knowing Differently
This book offers a bold and illuminating account of the worldviews nurtured and sustained by indigenous communities from across continents, through their distinctive understanding of concepts such as space, time, joy, pain, life, and death. It demonstrates how this different mode of ‘knowing’ has brought the indigenous into a cultural conflict with communities that claim to be modern and scientific. Bringing together scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving local knowledge that continues to be in the shadow of cultural extinction, the book attempts to interpret repercussions on identity and cultural transformation and points to the tragic fate of knowing the world differently. The volume inaugurates a new thematic area in post-colonial studies and cultural anthropology by highlighting the perspectives of marginalized indigenous communities, often burdened with being viewed as ‘primitive’. It will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, literature, and tribal studies.
