"Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa is a field-defining contribution to the country\2019s literary scholarship. Andrew van der Vlies\2019s introductory essay maps the conceptual terrain in a systematic and engaging way, illustrating its relevance to South Africa\2019s 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"--Back cover.
This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives—historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book- collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of "book history" for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.
Recenzijos
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)
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.
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.
