Overview

This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.

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9781009307369

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Christopher Warnes teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He has degrees from the University of Cape Town and the University of KwaZulu-Natal and was formerly a lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is the author of Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, the co-editor of Magical Realism and Literature, and has written articles and book chapters on South African literature.

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