To investigate the role of culture in the formation of a more radically democratic society, O'Brien brings together an unusual array of contemporary South African writing: cultural theory and debate, worker poetry, black and white feminist writing, Black Consciousness drama, the letters of exiled writers, and post-apartheid fiction and film. Paying subtle attention to well-known figures like Gordimer, Head, and Ndebele yet foregrounding less-studied writers like de Kok, Malange, Mapo-nya, and Marechera, O'Brien reveals in their work the construction of a political aesthetic more radically democratic than the current cultural normalization of nation-alism, ballot-box democracy, and liberal humanism. Notes, bib, index. xv, 333pp. USA . DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 0822325713

A major contribution to the study of South African literature, offering innovative readings of writers like Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, this study enhances our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control and of its imagined and actual transformation. Index, notes, 221pp, USA. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA.

Thorough and provocative analysis of South African children's literature during the decade around the release of Mandela. BNS, 160pp, USA. ROUTLEDGE, 0415936381

Self-contained essays that locate ethical and aesthetic challenges in the postcolonial era, both in South Africa and globally. What is Africa, what is the West? May the South and the North engage in new and challenging conversation? Teasing out the intricate value of literary culture in contemporary society, Chapman brings to this volume a new confidence and critical vocabu-lary that both energises older controversies and marks out fresh ground for debate. Index, 187pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

First broad-ranging reassessment of Nortje's life and poetic career. 163pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNISA PRESS.

An account of the gruelling, often dangerous, encounter with apartheid society by film director Lionel Rogosin while making his acclaimed film, shot in the late fifties in and around Johannesburg, particularly in Sophiatown. Rogosin's intention was to make a film that would 'give a voice' to the oppressed and, with considerable input from the legendary trio of Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane, writers associated with the pioneering magazine, Drum, he produced a unique and award winning piece of cinematographic history. Peter Davis, a filmmaker friend, has edited Rogosin's diaries into a fascinating portrait of life under apartheid, and of the efforts of activists and artists to change that system. Black and white photographs and film stills throughout. Includes tributes from friends Robert Downey Snr. and Milek Knebel. 149pp, SOUTH AFRICA. STE PUBLISHERS.

A compilation of work on D. H. Lawrence by past and present South African scholars in the country and abroad. Part One, 'Retrospect', which carries accounts of studying and teaching Lawrence in South Africa, is an important record of an aspect of English studies in that country as it developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Part Two includes reprints of nine of the best articles available on Lawrence from South African scholars, including Mark Kinkead-Weekes, H. M. Daleski and Christopher Heywood. Part Three has five new essays, including, for example, 'Judgement and Maturity in Sons and Lovers and The Fox', by Francois Hugo, and 'Conflicting Visions of the Primitive in D. H. Lawrence', by Jim Phelps. Part Four comprises two long poems inspired by Lawrence, and Part Five lists the articles, letters and reviews on Lawrence published in South African journals, and the theses and dissertations on Lawrencean subjects held at South African universities. Index, 335pp, SOUTH AFRICA. ECHOING GREEN PRESS.

A collection of the most significant works of one of South Africa's foremost thinkers and writers, on themes of Education, African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness and Literary Appreciation. Well known as a literary critic and fiction writer his novel Down Second Avenue was recently selected as one of Africa's 100 best books. 485pp, SOUTH AFRICA. KWELA BOOKS, 0795701527

Critical study of its subject, from colonial and pre-colonial times to the present. Discusses selected poems, plays and prose works in five literary traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. The discussion includes over 100 authors and selected works, including poets from Mqhayi, Marais and Campbell to Butler, Serote and Krog, theatre writers from Boniface and Black to Fugard and Mda, and fiction writers from Schreiner and Plaatje to Bessie Head and the Nobel prizewinner’s Gordimer and Coetzee. 310pp, UK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Serote looks at the concept of the African intellectual and the emergence of a South African national identity in the midst of the struggle for survival. 211pp, SOUTH AFRICA. VIVLIA PUBLISHERS, 1868673626

Investigates the ways in which identity is constituted in text and image in Breytenbach's works. Also points to ways in which these case-studies relate to other con-temporary identity formations in South Africa. Col & b/w ill, notes, refs, 127pp, SOUTH AFRICA. KWELA BOOKS, 0795701411

Examines film-makers' stereotype of imperialist South Africa, with whites in centre frame and Africans depicted as faithful servants or savage enemies. Based on interviews with directors, scriptwriters, actors and historians, relating film-making to broader changes in South African society and elsewhere. B/w illus, filmography, refs, index, 205pp, SOUTH AFRICA. RAVAN PRESS.

New in paperback. Following on from Stranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several (Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai) lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siecle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature's greatest writers, Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his 'wrestlings with the German language'. There is an essay on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul. 256pp, UK. VINTAGE.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee is one of the most widely taught contemporary writers, but also one of the most elusive. Many critics who have addressed his work have devoted themselves to rendering it more accessible and acceptable, often playing down the features that discomfort and perplex his readers. Yet it is just these features, Derek Attridge argues in eight essays covering 11 of Coetzee's novels and memoirs, that give Coetzee's work its haunting power and offer its greatest rewards. Index, bib, xiii, 225pp, USA. CHICAGO U P.

2004 0226031179 Paperback

Taking the author's ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to under-standing Coetzee's fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee's singular, modernist response to the apartheid and post-apartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. 264pp, USA. OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS.

A guide to the literary past and present of the Eastern Cape. Organised regionally, the visitor can explore the cities, towns, coasts and countryside discovering aspects of places through writers' eyes. Illustrated with poems, prose extracts, and photographs and drawings by Basil Mills. Index, bib, notes, map, xi, 402pp, SOUTH AFRICA. DOUBLE STOREY BOOKS, 1919930159

It's a cliché to describe South Africa as a land of infinite landscapes and dramatic contrasts. It's even harder to capture those landscapes in words. This book showcases scenes of the beloved country as described by the country's most celebrated writers. Ranging right through history, from the firelight tales of the first storytellers to modern voices on the web, this book encom-passes the brilliant kaleidoscope of our local scribes - from drama to poetry, from revered names to controversial voices, from hard-hitting journalism to lyrical meditations. 288pp, SOUTH AFRICA. DOUBLE STOREY BOOKS.

Looking at Mongane Serote's Gods in Our Time, Mike Nichol's The Ibis Tapestry and Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying, the author shows how literary engagement with the past seeks to rupture the continuity of a strongly dichotomised society and show new ways of constructing the past. Bib, notes, 135pp, DENMARK. MUSEUM TUSCULANUM PRESS, 8772897848

Uses a broad range of literature to examine the political culture of white South Africa, ranging from propoganda through bestsellers by Wilbur Smith and James McClure to literary works by Alan Paton, Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer. BNS, 216pp, UK. GREENWOOD PUBLISHING GROUP.

A collection of classic and recent critical essays on the novel. Also includes an interview and essay by Nadine Gordimer. BNS, 256pp, USA, 0195147170

Follows the development of Gordimer's writing in the context of the historical changes in South Africa. Index, 276pp, bib, SOUTH AFRICA. RAVAN PRESS, 0869753096

The first volume of South African author's correspondence collects 550 letters concerning the young Schreiner's work as a governess, the years she spent abroad, the publication of The Story of an African Farm, her relationships with Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, Edward Carpenter and W.T.Stead, and her involvement in the political crisis that culminated in the Anglo-Boer War. 409pp, UK. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Dennis Brutus, imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela is known worldwide for his unparalleled eloquence as an opponent of the apartheid South African regime. Since its fall, he has been a voice for global justice and humanity, speaking and writing extensively on issues of debt, poverty, war, racism and neoliberalism. This vital original collection of interviews, poetry and essays is the first book of its kind to bring together the full, forceful range of his work. 414pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

A comparison of the ways the novels of J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison memorialise the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt the postcolonial era. Index, notes, ix, 142pp, USA. STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, 0791459454

New edition of Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture appeared initially in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change, the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society. 184pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Connects the black literary canon in South Africa, from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century, to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history, literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation, that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments, and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity. Index, bib, notes, 236pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa. Selected contents: I Speak Their Wordless Woe, Dennis Brutus interviewed by Simon Lewis; All Autobiography is 'Autre'-biography, J.M.Coetzee interviewed by David Atwell; We Would Write Very Dull Books If We Just Wrote about Ourselves, Sindiwe Magona interviewed by Stephan Meyer; Metaphors of Self, Es'kia Mphahlele interviewed by N.Chabani Manganyi; Writing Autobiography and Writing Fiction, Doris Lessing interviewed by M.J.Daymond; Reflections in Identity, Breyten Breytenbach interviewed by Marilet Sienaert; 'Every Secret Thing' as Family Memoir, Gillian Slovo interviewed by Margaretta Jolly; Reflec-tions in a Cracked Mirror' Pieter-Dirk Uys interviewed by Mervyn McMurty; Philosophical Reflections on Chronicles of Conversion, Wilhelm Verwoerd interviewed by Stephan Meyer; Group Portrait: self, family and nation on exhibit, Paul Faber, Rayda Jacobs and David Goldblatt interviewed by Stephan Meyer. 487pp, USA. UNIVERSITY PRESS OF HAWAII.

A collection of seven essays on the life and work of Sindiwe Magona, celebrating her retirement from the UN and her return to South Africa. Also includes several interviews with Magona. Bib, notes, 207pp, SOUTH AFRICA. University of Kwazulu Natal Press.

What is the role of literature in contexts of severe political oppression and resistance? This study traces the responses to this question provided by the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives of land, race, gender, desire and embodiment. The volume explores these submerged dimensions of South African literary history and the influence they continue to exert well into the post-apartheid era. It suggests that significant continuities exist between late-apartheid and post-apartheid literary culture, and positions these against the interpretive horizon of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Index, 145pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNISA PRESS.

An illustrated work about the children's books written in or about South Africa. BNS, 256pp, UK. McFARLAND & COMPANY, 0786411058

Examines how cinema in South Africa represents national identities, particularly with regard to race. This significant and unique contribution establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa’s history, showing how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid. This study spans the twentieth century and beyond through detailed analyses of selected films, beginning with De Voortrekkers (1916) through to Mapantsula (1988) and films produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). Index, folmography, bib, notes, b/w illus, 220pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.

The depth and variety of South African poetry comes alive in these interviews, first published in the poetry journal New Coin. Twenty poets of the 1980s and 1990s talk about their aesthetics, politics, and the impulses that drive their writing. 182pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Argues that 'nation' and 'literature' are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005, asking: who published what, where, why, and how; how and why work was construed as 'South African', what this meant, and how it affected reading. Exploring new approaches to studying colonial and postcolonial print cultures, it seeks to redress inadequately historicised or transnationally situated studies of South African writing in English. 256pp, UK. MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Works within the frameworks of post-colonial studies and cultural studies in order to theorise, and then to illustrate, the possibilities for cultural creation in the context of oppression. It re-works the concept of hybridity, and the philosophies of liberalism and humanism, in order to suggest that these important and much-contested terrains within critical theory have specific potential in a South African context. This book applies these theoretical points to a specific trajectory of writing in English in the region, which it finds embodied in the writing of Solomon Plaatje, Peter Abrahams, Eskia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane and Can Themba. By seeking to unlock the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which Shakespeare is useful to these writers, the book addresses the traditional imbalance of knowledges in Shakespeare Studies by conceptualizing the presence of Shakespeare in these texts as indicative of an act of cultural appropriation and political resistance. BNS, 316pp, USA. EDWIN MELLEN PRESS.

Twenty-nine essays, mostly literary, on, among others, Defoe, Nooteboom, Kafka, Musil, Dostoevsky, Borges, Rushdie, Mahfouz, Mazrui, Doris Lessing. 374pp. UK.. VINTAGE.

A look at the South African film industry in transition from film making by the white minority to a national cinema. Index, refs, xii, 272pp, USA. WAYNE STATE U P.

Institute francais d'Afrique du Sud (IFAS) Working Papers Series number 6, August 2005. Essays on ten years of literary exchanges between France and South Africa. TEXT IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH. 89pp, SOUTH AFRICA. IFAS.

A consideration a specific instances of confessional practice and discourse in the works of ten prominent South African writers. The author takes issue with Michel Foucault, who argued that confession is only another form of oppressive discourse. 232pp, USA. HEINEMANN INC

A study tracing the development of literature in South Africa under apartheid and seeks to identify the ways in which writers and theatre practitioners are now facing the challenge of a new social order. The main focus is on the work of black writers, prime among them Matsemela Manaka, Mtutuzeli Matshoba and Richard Rive. Bib, 376pp, THE NETHERLANDS. RODOPI.

Tributes, critical essays, extracts from their novels, interviews and photographs commemorating the lives of two promising young South African writers who died within five weeks of one another. Index, 264pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UMGANGATHO MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS.

A study of Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele discussing how each author forms a response to the upheavals of late apartheid. Index, bib, notes, xii, 274pp, SOUTH AFRICA. University of Kwazulu Natal Press.

Contemporary women writers in South Africa and Australia are still writing about similar issues as did earlier generations of women, such as exclusions from discourses of nation, the problematic relationship to place and belonging, relations with indigenous people and the way in which women's subjectivity has been constructed through national stereotypes and representations. This book describes and analyses some contemporary responses to these issues through close readings of particular texts including Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup and Eva Sallis's The City of Sealions. BNS, 240pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.