South African Literature's Russian Soul

Narrative Forms of Global Isolation

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781350030305
• eBook ISBN: 9781472593016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature's Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing's "Golden Age" in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as a model for South African writers both during and after apartheid. Exploring these two isolated literary cultures alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Russia in the South African Imaginary
• 2. The Novel at a Crossroads: Gordimer, Tlali, and the Struggle for Form
• 3. Making Animals Work in Tolstoy, Coetzee, and Van Niekerk
• 4. Retreating Reality: Chekhov’s South African Afterlives
• 5. Émigré Fiction and the Double-Bind of Home
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Index