Transnationalism in Southern African Literature

Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture

By Stefan Helgesson

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About the Book

Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique.

Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese in ‘anticolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and transcontinental vectors of southern African literature after the Second World War.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: World Literature, the Print Medium, and the Writing of Postcolonial Literary History

Chapter Two: Shifting Fields: Imagining Literary Renewal in Itinerário and Drum

Chapter Three: Lewis Nkosi, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Eugénio Lisboa – Beginnings in African Literary Criticism

Chapter Four: Sing for Our Metropolis: Self and Media in the Poetry of Rui Knopfli and Wopko Jensma

Chapter Five: Print and Colonialism in Southern African Realism

Conclusion: African Literature Then and Now

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author(s)

Stefan Helgesson is a research fellow in the literature department at Uppsala University, South Africa. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (UKZN Press, 2004) and editor of Literary Interactions in the Modern World, (Vol. 4 of Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, de Gruyter, 2006).