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1986 was a pivotal year in South African history. It was the year of the vigilante, the year of the necklace – but also the year the talking began. Drawing on newspaper articles, memoirs, and little-known histories, William Dicey presents a compelling diary of a very bad year. He focuses on ordinary people, showing what life was actually like under an authoritarian regime – from the six hours a day that black workers in KwaNdebele spent on buses to the rebel sporting tours that provided a distraction for white South Africans. Some stories foreshadow the miracle of 1990 – for instance, the deputy commander of Pollsmoor Prison takes Nelson Mandela on a scenic drive around Cape Town, years before his eventual release. Other stories shine a light on our current conflicts. Written in crisp prose, 1986 is a model of historical excavation, deftly evoking the spirit of the times.
"From a carcass competition in the Karoo to a shambolic murder trial in Cape Town, William Dicey's essays freewheel across an open terrain of interests. Dicey is curious and inventive, weaving strands of essay, journalism, fiction and self-reportage into something uniquely his own. Mongrel investigates a range of topics - radical environmentalism, the fault lines between farmer and farm worker, the joys and sorrows of reading - yet drifts of concern and sensibility draw the collection together. Several essays touch on how books can move, and sometimes maul, their readers. Mongrel is idiosyncratic, witty, potent."--From back cover.
Reissue of a novel first published in 1985. An insurance salesman and an art curator witness the capture of illegal immigrants on the Canadian-USA border and help a woman to escape. The former strangers cross and re-cross borders - between countries, between past and present, and reality and illusion. Author holds a permanent position at the University of South Carolina as Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence. Her other books include 'The Ivory Swing', winner of Canada's Seal Award, and 'Charades', which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the Banjo and the Adelaide Festival National Fiction Awards.
This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.
Readers are taken on a fascinating journey down the Orange River in South Africa in this travelogue that interweaves historical detail from the places the author visits with the history of South Africa as a whole. Augmented with the author's own photographs, this is a document of discovery, much like the source material that Dicey himself quotes from-the first European explorers of the South African interior. But unlike early depictions of outlandish animals and men, Dicey's travelogue investigates the waves of human occupation-the San, the Nama, the Griqua, and the Basters-and the subsequent fallout as the indigenous people were moved off their land around the Orange River.
Masquerading as a man, seeking adventure, going to war or to sea for love and glory, the transvestite heroine flourished in all kinds of literature, especially ballads, from the Renaissance to the Victorian age. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 identifies this heroine and her significance as a figure in folklore, and as a representative of popular culture, prompting important reevaluations of gender and sexuality. Dugaw has uncovered a fascination with women cross-dressers in the popular literature of early modern Europe and America. Surveying a wide range of Anglo-American texts from popular ballads and chapbook life histories to the comedies and tragedies of aristocratic literature, she demonstrates the extent to which gender and sexuality are enacted as constructs of history.