Literary Transactions in South Africa

Michael Chapman is Professor and Researcher-in-Residence at Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He was previously Professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (formerly University of Natal), South Africa. His publications include over 100 journal articles and six monographs, including most recently On Literary Attachment in South Africa: Tough Love (2021).

• AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I. Literature in History1. The ‘Oral’ in the South of Africa: Usable Pasts, Translation, Transaction2. Thomas Pringle, An ‘Unsettling’ Settler: Literature in History3. Africanism and Westernism: Interpreting, Evaluating S. E. K. MqhayiPart II. Styles of the Times4. The Best of Modernism and the Worst of Modernism: Roy Campbell, A Politically Incorrect Poet5. Gender-based Abuse, the Sophiatown Shebeens, and Presentism in Can Themba’s Stories Beyond ‘The Suit’6. The Story of Community: ‘To be less than an artist to be more than an artist’7. Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee: An Aesthetics of NecessityPart III. After Postcolonialism?8. After Coetzee, After Postcolonialism: Writing Fiction, Interpreting Fiction 9. Transactions of the Local and the Global: Writing, Interpreting PoetryNotesReferencesIndex

Interspersed with nuggets of oft-overlooked or unfamiliar archival material, Michael Chapman’s Literary Transactions in South Africa, is a pivotal read, a tour de force of literary scholarship and the politics of interpretation. The culmination of a lifetime of critical engagement and teaching, the book seamlessly delivers its declared aim: ‘to explore, afresh, significant “moments” of the past in relation to current debate,’ bringing literary history and South African literary production right up to your doorstep and climaxing in an interrogatory discussion of the ‘glocal’ ‘posts-,’ viz. ‘After Coetzee – After Postcolonialism.’ No-one will regret the making of space on his or her overcrowded bookshelf for this ‘must read’, ‘must have’ publication