Overview

Honourable Mention in the 2023 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize The Short Story after Apartheid offers the first major study of the anglophone short story in South Africa since apartheid’s end. By focusing on the short story this book complicates models of South African literature dominated by the novel and contributes to a much-needed generic and formalist turn in postcolonial studies. Literary texts are sites of productive struggle between formal and extra-formal concerns, and these brief, fragmentary, elliptical, formally innovative stories offer perspectives that reframe or revise important concerns of post-apartheid literature: the aesthetics of engaged writing, the politics of the past, class and race, the legacies of violence, and the struggle over the land. Through an analysis of key texts from the period by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes, this book assesses the place of the short story in post-apartheid writing and develops a fuller model of how artworks allow and disallow forms of social thought.

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9781805967040

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘(T)his is a capacious and idea-filled study with an overarching organizational structure that is almost architectural in its detail and sophistication.’ Timothy Wright, Safundi ‘A genre that has been, if not absent then at least conspicuously peripheral to the critical project of making sense of South Africa’s temporally discombobulated present, is the short story. Fortunately, Graham K. Riach’s superb new monograph, The Short Story After Apartheid ..., has now arrived to address that oversight. In a series of lucid, socially informed and technically astute close readings of curated selections of stories by five eminent South African practitioners of the craft - Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe, and Henrietta Rose-Innes - Riach demonstrates how paying attention to matters of form in short fiction can “shape the reader’s orientation to the world outside the text.”’ Eckard Smuts, Safundi 'With this generic and formal focus, the monograph proves extremely useful for specialists of the short story and for readers of South African (and more largely post-colonial) literature alike, in that it provides deep reflections on the genre, while considerably enriching the way in which post-apartheid, and even earlier South African fiction has so far been read.' Mathilde Rogez, Journal of the Short Story in English ‘This is a pioneering effort in unravelling the complexities of the short story form within the broader landscape of postcolonial studies, challenging prevailing paradigms that often prioritize the novel.’ Jude Nwabuokei, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 'Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story after Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature is an important contribution to the study of the Anglophone short story in South Africa.... Riach’s formal intervention is practiced in five chapters of engaging and highly skilled close-readings.’ Baron Glanvill, Research in African Literatures ‘The Short Story after Apartheid (is) an invaluable contribution to South African literary studies.' Marta Fossati, Short Fiction in Theory & Practice '[A] thought-provoking study of a neglected form.' Michael Chapman, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa

Author Information

Graham K. Riach is a lecturer in English at the University of Amsterdam.

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