Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa

Andrew van der Vlies is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and Research Associate in the Department of English Literature at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His areas of expertise include South African literatures and literary cultures, Anglophone postcolonial writing, and print and book histories. He is a literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist, and author of South African Textual Cultures (2010). He reviews regularly for various publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and Art South Africa.Leon de Kock is Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg. He is a poet, translator, essayist, and occasional writer of fiction. His writing includes the novel, Bad Sex (2011); three volumes of poetry: Bloodsong (1997), Gone to the Edges (2006), Bodyhood (2010); several works of literary translation, and academic books.Archie L. Dick is a Professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria.Natasha Distiller is Research Associate in the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Patrick Denman Flanery is professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

• Print cultures and colonial public spheres; local/global: south african writing and global imaginaries; three ways of looking at coetzee; questions of the archive and the uses of books; orature, image, text; ideological exigencies and the fates of books; new directions.

Print, text and book cultures in South Africa is a field-defining contribution to the country's literary scholarship. Andrew van der Vlies's introductory essay maps the conceptual terrain in a systematic and engaging way, illustrating its relevance to South Africa's literary and cultural history. The essays that follow demonstrate the archival richness and liveliness of the field, while opening doors to future research. Beyond South Africa, the book will be exemplary in showing how book histories develop under postcolonial conditions. - David Attwell, author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)