South African Literature's Russian Soul

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

1. Introduction. Russia in the South African Imaginary

2. The Novel at a Crossroads: Gordimer, Tlali, & the Struggle for Form
I. Testing Trans-Century Parallels
II. Gordimer’s Effacement by Narration
III. The Path of Progress in Miriam Tlali’s Amandla

3. Making Animals Work in Tolstoy, Coetzee, and Van Niekerk
I. Dismantling Tolstoy’s Strider
II. Coetzee’s Action of Absence
III. Enduring Isolation in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf

4. Retreating Reality: Chekhov’s South African Afterlives
I. Structuring Chekhovian Timelessness
II. De Wet’s Self-Disabling Response
III. The Risky Business of Canonical Affirmation

5. Émigré Fiction and the Double-Bind of Home
I. Permeable Repossessions and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory
II. Mark Behr’s Not-Quite-Global Novel
III. Nkosi’s Mandela’s Ego as Ambivalent Mourning

6. Epilogue.

Works Cited

Index