Abstract
The themes of land and language have a special resonance in the case of South Africa, where a second tongue of European origins is also spoken. The qualifier “European origins” (rather than simply European) is required here because, although its major source is Dutch (of which it was long considered a mere dialect), Afrikaans is not — and never was — spoken outside Africa. Culturally if not philologically, then, it might even be considered an “African” language, rather as Afrikaners can regard themselves as the “white African tribe”; both assumptions are in fact common in Afrikaner constructions of national identity, with their emphasis on the indivisibility of the volk (people), eie taal (a language of one’s own), and the land (the African “homeland”): all of which concepts dramatically pre-empt any dicussion of land and language restricted to comparisons with the mainstream fiction of England or the United States.
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Further Reading
The indispensable guide to South African fiction is Michael Chapman’s Southern African Literatures (Longman, 1996). Chapman has also edited (with C. Gardner and Esk’ia Mphahlele) the comprehensive Perspectives on South African Literature (Johannesburg, 1992). A seminal study of various South African writers included in this section is
J. M. Coetzee’s White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Since South Africa probably has the least familiar literary tradition of the four anz/sac countries, two short prose anthologies — A Land Apart (Faber and Faber, 1990), edited by André Brink and John Coetzee, and
Writing for South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1995), edited by Anthony Adams and Ken Durham — are worth attention.
Apart from the definitive Literary History of Canada, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1976) and vol. 4, edited by W. H. New (forthcoming), there are two useful and easily available literary histories: W. J. Keith’s more traditional Canadian Literature in English (Longman, 1985) and
W. H. New’s chronological but thematically structured A History of Canadian Literature (Macmillan, 1989). Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), Margaret Atwood’s highly personal thematic guide to Canadian literature, is a rare example of a bestseller in its genre; more mainstream in approach is
John Moss’s A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel (Toronto: MacClelland and Stewart, 1987).
There is generous coverage of Canadian fiction in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vols 53 and 60 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986, 1987) for Canadian writers since 1960; and vols 68 and 88 (1988, 1989) for Canadian writers from 1920 to 1959. All four volumes, combining anglophone and francophone authors, are edited by W. H. New.
Graeme Gibson’s Eleven Canadian Novelists (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1973) is a suggestive, if now slightly dated, series of interviews. More recent is the collection
Canadian Novelists and the Novel (Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1981), edited by Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman.
Terry Goldie’s provocative Fear and Loathing: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literature (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 1989) is an important thematic study for both sections of Part III.
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© 1998 John Skinner
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Skinner, J. (1998). South Africa and Canada. In: The Stepmother Tongue. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26898-6_8
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