South African Textual Cultures

South African textual cultures is a wide-ranging study that traces out the ‘biographies’ of a number of important books (from Story of an African Farm to The Heart of Redness) on their journeys across national boundaries and through different historical moments. It is not enough, nor entirely accurate, to say that this is an important contribution to South African literary studies: South African textual cultures is, rather, the first major study to question the very category of ‘South African literature’ and to describe the process of its construction in a sustained, engaging, theoretically astute manner.

Meticulously researched and eloquently argued, this book brings fresh perspectives to the study of South African - and African - literature, making detailed use of publishers’ archives and newspaper reviews to analyse the discourses and cultural networks in which literary texts are immersed. Van der Vlies usefully problematises the categories of the ‘global’ and the ‘national,’ and he draws attention to the diverse interpretive contexts in which anglophone South African literature is immersed. This book will provide inspiration to students and researchers, offering a methodology and a new set of questions for the study of postcolonial literatures.