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Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space

Autor Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 19 mar 2021
Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space analyzes the representation of space in recent works by South African writers. By combining analytical tools borrowed from Gothic studies with geocritical and postcolonial approaches, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain assesses the literary mechanisms utilized by Damon Galgut, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauren Beukes, Justin Carwright, and Lynn Freed to negotiate the complexities of post-apartheid identities in their fiction. Joseph-Vilain argues that the literary representations of emblematic places, real or imagined (the home, the farm, the city or the "non-places" of dystopia), express and reveal anxieties linked to the sharing of space in post-apartheid South Africa. The text successively (re-)visits the places that have been shaping South African white writing since Olive Schreiner's African Farm-in other words, its topoi, both in the etymological sense of "place" and in the literary sense of recurring themes or arguments. Joseph-Vilain argues that these Gothicized topoi have provided writers with tools to explore the deep anxieties generated by the redefinition of South African society as the Rainbow Nation. While focusing specifically on the South African avatars of the Gothic and their interaction with local forms and genres like the plaasroman, the text also discusses the impact of globalization on South African literary, cultural, social, and political identities.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781683932451
ISBN-10: 1683932455
Pagini: 318
Dimensiuni: 163 x 227 x 26 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Cuprins

Chapter 1. The Sense of Place
Chapter 2. Unhomely homes
Chapter 3. Landscapes
Chapter 4. Cities: South African "Urban Gothic"
Chapter 5. Non-places

Recenzii

The Gothic genre has become extremely popular in South Africa since apartheid. Joseph-Vilai maintains that the eerie and disturbing qualities of Gothic writing express the anxieties of a troubled society, and she makes a strong case... Especially interesting is the author's discussion of the Gothic transformation of a keystone of South African white writing, the "farm novel." The last and most original chapter, "Non-Places," looks at science fiction and dystopian writing. Joseph-Vilain concedes that she is not a South African, but points out that an outsider can have special insights. She interrogates the explosively problematic term "white" with insight, and she skillfully balances theory and close reading. Including an extensive bibliography, helpful notes, and a thorough index, this will be an useful resource for those interested in South African writing. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
This is a most timely and elucidating work, lucid in exposition and wide ranging in its target texts as well as its theoretical underpinning. The book reads informatively even to somebody not in the first instance engaged by the Gothic as a genre or temper, and, as I have attempted to highlight, its wider import is in the critical study and exposition of South African landscapes. It is up to date, introduces the reader to contemporary white and English (and, obliquely, Afrikaans) authors. It grows out of the pioneering White Writing (1988) of Coetzee, without falling into its shadow. And its author makes a persuasive and closely argued case for the impress of the
Gothic upon recent literary production in South Africa.

A welcome contribution to the scholarship devoted to South African literary studies, Post-Apartheid Gothic shows how a postcolonial dialogue with the Gothic in the new "Rainbow Nation" proves extremely suggestive. The emergence of this new literary form, which Joseph-Vilain labels "post-apartheid gothic," brings her study into dialogue with contemporary investigations on the Gothic as a "global" mode capable of traveling through time and space and of adapting to different cultures. At the same time, it reflects particular, local preoccupations in South Africa, responding to the need felt by white writers for coming to terms with an outrageous history of oppression and redefining a new, problematic subjectivity. [The] book succeeds in emphasizing how white anxieties are staged through a broadening of textual boundaries and a radical experimentation in generic practice, using Gothic motifs to creatively map both physical and psychological territories.