South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation

Description

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alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Assistant Professor of World Anglophone literature at Johns Hopkins University, USA.

Jackson's South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation [is] well researched and well informed in the relevant scholarship areas for her study, be it Russian Literature, South African Literature, or Literary Theory on the novel from nineteenth-century realism to contemporary theories on the novel. Her ideas are lucidly expressed and corroborated with relevant textual evidence ... Scholars in the related fields of African Literature, Russian Literature, Contemporary Literature, Comparative Literature, World Literature, Literary Theory, and Global Studies will find South African Literature's Russian Soul a valuable acquisition. * Comparative Literature Studies * Jackson's comparisons are guided by a strong theoretical consciousness and a very thorough knowledge of the two fields ... Readers should ... savour for themselves the richness and complexity of the overall argument as well as the subtle and profound insights Jackson gleans from her juxtaposition of South African and Russian literature. * Literary Research * Jeanne-Marie Jackson's book examines the striking series of elective affinities between South African writers and their Russian precursors, from Tolstoy to Nabokov. Anyone with an interest in South African literature will want to read this book, not only for the questions of influence it deals with, but for the way it explores the manifold connections between the local and the global. * Patrick Hayes, Teaching Fellow in English Literature, St John's College, University of Oxford, UK * Jeanne-Marie Jackson's work breaks genuinely new ground in the study of the postcolonial novel-by reading the novels of apartheid-era South Africa not in relationship to Anglo-American literature, but by considering their relationship to the Russian realist novels of the nineteenth century. ...[It] is often dazzling in its analytic precision, its heft, its depth of analysis. * Katie Trumpener, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University, USA * In South African Literature's Russian Soul, Jeanne-Marie Jackson has written what is in many ways the most original and yet the most traditional study of this country's intellectual culture--original because it inspects and reworks the existing frameworks by which we understand the national and international dimensions of the written word, traditional because it does its conceptual work with the old-fashioned virtues of capacious historical learning and microscopic engagement with the details of language and imagination. It is the one book I'll recommend to writers as well as readers who are orienting themselves to this part of the world. * Imraan Coovadia, novelist and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. *