DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari" (And Other Tales of South-West Africa) by Frederick Carruthers Cornell. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.
This study deals with a particular kind of short story in South African English literature - a kind of story variously called the fireside tale, tall tale, skaz narrative or (the term used here) the 'oral-style' story. Most famously exemplified in the Oom Schalk Lourens narratives of Herman Charles Bosman, the oral-style story has its roots in the hunting tale and camp-fire yarn of the nineteenth century and has dozens of exponents in South African literature, most of them long forgotten. Here this neglect has been addressed. A.W. Drayson's Tales at the Outspan (1862) provides a point of departure, and is followed by discussions of works by William Charles Scully, Percy FitzPatrick, Ernest Glanville, Perceval Gibbon, Francis Carey Slater, Pauline Smith, and Aegidius Jean Blignaut, all of whom used the oral-style story genre. In the work of Herman Charles Bosman, however, the South African oral-style story comes into its own. In his Oom Schalk Lourens figure is invested all of the complexity and 'double-voicedness' that was latent - and largely dormant - in the earlier works. Bosman demonstrates his sophistication particularly in his metafictional use of the oral-style story. The study concludes with a discussion of the use of oral forms in the work of more recent black writers - among them Bessie Head, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, and Njabulo Ndebele.
