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Full Description
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000.
The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional.
The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.
Contents
1. Introduction: The short story in South Africa - new trends and perspectives 2. "Translated from the dead": The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić's 101 Detectives 3. Coloured by history, shaped otherwise: A "decolonial" reading of Zoë Wicomb 4. Hyper-compression and the rise of the deep surface: Flash fiction in "post-transitional" South Africa 5. Queer temporalities in two short stories by Makhosazana Xaba: The afterlife of Can Themba's "The Suit" 6. Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction 7. Therianthropic power in Mohale Mashigo's speculative short fiction 8. Navigating the spectacular in queer African erotic short fiction 9. Imagining Africa's futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes's "Poison" and NoViolet Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest" 10. On reading, writing and being read: Journeying with the short story 11. Short stories born from the womb of the past 12. "Concrete fragments": An interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes 13. LongStorySHORT: Decolonising the reading landscape - A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube 14. "My stories will remain written the way I talk": A conversation with Niq Mhlongo
