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Full Description
Through detailed close readings alongside investigations into the history of print culture, Marta Fossati traces the development of the South African short story in English from the late 1920s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. She examines a selection of short stories by important Black South African writers (Rolfes and Herbert Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Ahmed Essop, and Zoë Wicomb) with an alertness to the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics performed by these texts.
This new history of Black short fiction problematises and interrogates the often-polarised readings of Black literature in South Africa that can be torn between notions of literariness, protest, and journalism. Due to material constraints, short fiction in South Africa circulated first and foremost through local print media, which Fossati analyses in detail to show the cross-fertilisation between journalism and the short story. While rooted in the South African context, the short stories considered also hold a translocal dimension, allowing us to explore the ethical and aesthetic practice of intertextuality. These are writings that complicate the aesthetics/ethics binary, generic classifications, and the categories of the literary and the political.
Theoretically eclectic in its approach, although largely underpinned by a narratological analysis, The South African Short Story in English, 1920-2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics offers a fresh perspective on the South African short story in English, spotlighting several hitherto marginalised figures in South African literary studies.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: 'Like the Flash of Fireflies'
1: Between The Sjambok and the Bantu World Fiction and Journalism in Rolfes Dhlomo's Short Stories
2: Experimentalism in Herbert Dhlomo's Ten 'Unpublished' Short Stories
3: Interlude: Dark Testament by Peter Abrahams
4: The 'Fabulous Decade': Realism and Literariness in the Short Fiction by Can Themba and Alex La Guma
5: 'Eenheid and Apartheid': Unity and Difference in Mtutuzeli Matshoba's and Ahmed Essop's Short-Story Cycles
6: Beyond South Africa and the Politics of Realism: The Textuality of Reality in Zoë Wicomb's Two Short-Story Cycles
Bibliography
Index
