South African Literature's Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing)

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alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons. Review “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 \* “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. Book Description Explores the influence of "golden age" Russian writing on contemporary South African literature. How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? This book charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. 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 Russia In The South African Imaginary -- The Novel At A Crossroads: Gordimer, Tlali, And The Struggle For Form -- Making Animals Work In Tolstoy, Coetzee, And Van Niekerk -- Retreating Reality: Chekhov's South African Afterlives -- Émigré Fiction And The Double-bind Of Home. Jeanne-marie Jackson. Based On The Author's Dissertation, Yale University. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 219-232) And Index. Cover -- 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