A History of South African Literature – Afrikaans Literature since 1930

The third volume concluding my comprehensive, novel history of South-African/Afrikaans literature explores the period from the 1930s onwards. Disentangled from pressures understandably faced by South-African scholars, my project casts the literature of South Africa as both a direct research object and a laboratory for testing literary-theoretical paradigms, wherein it aligns with linguists’ long-standing approach to the Afrikaans language. Building on the previous volumes, I employ G. Gachev’s theory of acceleration of literary development and Kafka’s kleine Literatur notion to address South-African literature as resulting from a complex network of negotiations at the interface of literary practices, discursive processes and cultural developments. In the last volume, this framework is expanded by drawing on K. White’s geopoetics, which helps me innovatively investigate South-African literaryhistorical processes in terms of the temporal evolution of literary diction, the articulation of power over space in language, the construction of imaginative geographies, the relevance of literary representations to identity formation, the politics of place and the literary-cultural renderings of varied communal experiences of space and geopolitics. The final outcome is envisaged both as a practical history of a local (South-African) literature and as an experimental interpretive model applicable to the study of other literatures of the region.