Contrasts between realism and romance appear easy to make. Realism is a mode of writing embedded in history. It attaches itself to empirical and observable life. Its watchword is credibility. In the nineteenth century realism belongs among the agnostics. It is unconvinced that there is more than what can be known on the earth. It is quintessentially the achievement of the mid-Victorian novel, though its roots and its influence stretch far. Realism proposes the reality of tangible experience. It offers language as that which can call up simulacra of existence in which its readers can believe. The empiricist Aristotle is its remote figurehead. Romance is realism's quirky counter, its opposite number. Romance belongs with Plato and belief in forms and meaning beyond visibility. In the nineteenth century romance makes imaginative enthrallment out of implausibility. It assumes a world beyond what can be touched and tested; its laws are not merely those of the earth. The preoccupations of romance are fantasy, imagination, and strangeness: romance is a mode in which literary language presents phenomena that cannot be measured against what readers think they already know. Realism easily turns to politics; romance to religion. Realism can solicit readers for tears; romance, for surprise, curiosity, baffement. Realism is a discourse of the senses; romance of the sensational. Realism belongs with satire: a mode of writing rooted in experience. Realism persistently feels the drag of tragedy: it is an expression of the painfulness of being alive.

Speaking from a South African point of view, translation, or a ‘change of tongue’ (in the words of the multilingual poet and self-translator Antjie Krog) is both a mode of being in the colony/postcolony as well as a form of writing. That is to say, before one is able to talk meaningfully about translation as an act of writing and as a way of delivering literary-symbolic goods, one must first go into what Zoë Wicomb, relying on J. M. Coetzee, calls the ‘yard of Africa’ (‘Translations’, p. 209) and pick one's way through the uneven trading of identity via language and the fraught ‘translation’ of subjectivities in that ‘yard’ of colonisation and its aftermath.

Indeed, colonisation and its cognate, conflict, are what yield writing in Southern Africa, as Michael Chapman has argued (Southern African Literatures, pp. 1–16). It is an established article of knowledge in southern African studies that prior to the 350 or so years of colonial and neocolonial rule in this region, non-literate or oral cultures held sway. And, when the Book arrived on the shores of the Cape, along with the printing press, it was centrally implicated in a process of ‘conversion’ that by now has been well documented: ‘heathens’ and ‘barbarians’ had to be pacified and induced into a culture in which they would, by indoctrination, inculcation and violence, both physical and epistemic, become receptive to book learning.

The twentieth century's first modern war

The Second Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902), commencing in the final months of the nineteenth century and overshadowing the beginning of the war-ridden and genocidal twentieth, represented the first modern war, as is now widely recognised. In terms of its participants, its political and economic impact, and also its literary representation, the war was international in scope in large-scale ways that other late nineteenth-century conflicts like the Crimean and the Spanish-American wars had anticipated but did not match. In technological and military terms, too, the war cast long shadows across twentieth-century world history. In the major formal battles of the war's first pre-guerrilla phase – Elandslaagte, Modder Rivier, Colenso, Magersfontein – modern devices such as the field telephone, hot-air balloon reconnaissance, and the smokeless rifle were used in combination with conventional drillblock advances for the first time. The empire's volunteer army numbered up to a million men, many of them literate and educated, drawn from all corners of the globe – Canada and New Zealand, Ireland and Australia – and the Boers, too, drew on diverse international support, including from France, Russia, the Netherlands, and, again, Ireland. Correspondents hailing from as many countries again reported on activities on both sides. The powerful long-range weaponry, barbed-wire fortified trenches, and, notoriously, concentration camp installations that marked the war, and also the guerrilla tactics the Boers deployed from June 1900, represented critical, even shocking, new departures in the annals of warfare, whose destructive impact, on amass scale, the 1914–18 conflict only magnified.

Introduction: ex-cavate [to uncover or lay bare by digging; to unearth]

Like most discussions involving the palimpsest this, too, begins with the concept’s common dictionary definition, ‘a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another’. Palimpsesting originally referred to the technique used by ancient artisans to reuse scarce material for their inscriptions of new ideas and ideals of new, emerging worlds. In the word’s extended meaning, a palimpsest is more generally described as ‘a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multilayered record’. The term has thus become a powerful metaphor for what Freud described as the ‘receptive surface … legible in suitable lights’, any surface, really, onto which New superimposes itself on Old. Samuel Coleridge is generally credited with introducing the palimpsest as a literary metaphor, but it was Thomas de Quincey who wove it into a treatise on human memory: ‘What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?’ – anticipating, of course, the idea of the receptive surface. In a slightly different vein Rudolph Byrd evokes Stuart Hall’s notion of metaphors of transformation, suggesting that the palimpsest may indeed function as a master metaphor in this respect, challenging us to ‘think expansively beyond the boundaries of what is known about the relations between the social and the symbolic‘.

Gothic fiction emerged froma dreamand subsided into infamy, but in the years 1764–1810 it included works that were thematically challenging and formally innovative; and much that first took shape in gothic fiction changed the face of novel-writing for generations after its lurid heyday. The rather infamous inception of the gothic novel – Horace Walpole recounts a dream in which antiquarian imaginings led him to scribble far into the night – is repeated and recast in other famous gothic iterations such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898). Most important, however, are the details of Walpole's dream itself and the ways in which it inspired an incipient gothic technique. Walpole's account, addressed to his friend William Cole, describes the dream in full:

Throughout a roughly fifty-year period in the late nineteenth century which saw the emergence of African nationalism, articulated in the black press by the rising Christian elite, there were specific nodes that facilitated early black print culture. What Switzer (‘Introduction’, p. 22) has called ‘the African protest press’ was nurtured in indigenous Christian communities that emerged from rural stations which European and American missionary societies first established in southern Africa during the early nineteenth century. The mission schools of the various societies working among the indigenous peoples created literate (kholwa) communities on mission stations, and their presses gradually produced a literature in the vernacular among the amaXhosa and Batswana in the Cape Colony, the Basotho in Basutoland (Lesotho) and the southern Orange Free State, and the amaZulu in Natal and Zululand.

Whilst the spoken languages of the various indigenous peoples were highly developed and their traditional lore abundant, none had a written alphabet, so the task before the early missionaries from various missionary societies was to provide orthographies for the different vernaculars, to initiate a culture of reading and writing, and to disseminate the Scriptures and other religious material to an increasingly literate readership. ‘The preaching and teaching ministry’, notes Switzer in Power and Resistance (p. 119), ‘were dependent on the mission's control and manipulation of literate culture.’ Most mission stations acquired a printing press in order to publish devotional and evangelical literature and to assist in the industrial training of new male converts.

Words of power

‘Words are sacred’, Anishinaabe poet and editor Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm reminds us. ‘They can transform. Words can change peoples’ attitudes, their thinking, their construction of reality, their actions. Words can change the world. As can silence’. To understand the literatures of Indigenous peoples in Canada, one must recognize the power of words, especially when their source is rooted in the peoples who have called this land home for thousands of years, and whose voices have all too often been passively ignored or actively silenced since the onset of European invasion in the sixteenth century.

In the continuing colonial context of Canada, where Aboriginal peoples make up just over 3 per cent of the entire population, the very existence of Indigenous words is a reminder that this is, indeed, a colonized land, and that its first peoples have not gone away or resigned themselves to silence. If anything, their words – in writing as well as ceremony, song, and performance and visual art – affirm the growing representational strength of Native peoples in this land, a strength born of both expansive vision and continuing struggle. The resulting expressive archive – richly realized and diverse in form, purpose and content – constellates a very different understanding of Canada than that assumed by its settler citizens.

Traditional contexts

While the oral cultures in southern Africa may share the same oral genres and performance strategies, different contexts provide for peculiarities. A few of these contexts will be mentioned before elaborating on aspects of Ndebele verbal art as an illustration of the range and evolution of oral discourse in South Africa.

In her study on Hananwa and Lobedu oral performance, Annekie Joubert gives an idea of the vibrancy of their song culture in particular:

The annual rainmaking ceremony performed by the people of ‘the rain queen’ Modjadji of the Lobedu showcases the most important ceremony. Joubert's study, however, gives a view of the daily struggles and pastimes of men, but especially those of women. Secluded on the plateau of the Blouberg, a mountain in the north-west of the country, Lobedu women sing about their cares as they are left behind by their migrant husbands.

Fictional representations of slavery begin with texts such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, a novella that was hugely popular in its time and widely adapted for the stage for over a century after its publication. The most recent adaptation, Biyi Bandele’s 1991 play, is an adaptation of adaptations. The Royal Shakespeare Company enlisted Nigerian-born Bandele to adapt a play based on both Restoration dramatist Thomas Southerne’s 1695 Oroonoko and John Hawkesworth’s 1759 play by the same name. These multiple layers of adaptation are no less rich than the sources Behn used for her novella. Depicting the tragedy of an African prince who, along with his beloved, is sold into New World slavery, Behn follows the slave trade back across the Atlantic to Africa, becoming the first English author to represent sub-Saharan African people in their own continent. To familiarize her readers with her characters and settings, Behn made use of the conventions of the New World travel story, the courtly romance and the heroic tragedy and, especially, the conventions of the Oriental romance, including the trope of the Noble Savage. Beyond familiarizing the foreign, Behn’s strategies helped highlight the human tragedy of the slave trade. As a heroic tragedy, Behn’s novella ‘exaggerates precisely those emotional experiences that were often suppressed by historical description, debates, and documentary records’ about the slave trade. In its various adaptations, Oroonoko became part of the abolitionist movement in England, and was eventually considered a forerunner to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Hardy's passage detailing the marriage of Jude and Arabella is as saturated in ironies as it is in harsh social criticism. In wryly paraphrasing the terms of their marriage contract, Hardy has substituted “feel” and “desire” where “love” and “honour” appear in the Book of Common Prayer's solemnization of matrimony. It is carnal passion, not love, that has united the couple, an ill-fated alliance whose numbing monotony is accentuated in the deforming repetition of the marital vow. Society has consecrated “desire” (misrecognizing it as “love”) as the basis for marriage when it should comprehend desire as shortlived. In Jude the Obscure it is not so much the familiar Hardyesque elements “nature” and “fate” that ensnare his restless protagonists but the ludicrous laws that require marriage to solidify momentary escapades into lifelong commitments. With Jude the inhabitable microcosm that Jane Austen's fictionmade out of love-consecrated marriage becomes at the century's end a prison-house.

In writing with such acerbity Hardy anticipates a distinction that animates literary critics attending to Victorian fiction a century later. For of all the reconceptualizations in the 1980s and 1990s, none has been more influential than the deployment of “desire” where once “love” or “courtship” had demarcated intimate relations in fiction. The value of “desire” as an animating concept arises from its subtlety and allusiveness, encompassing a range of impulses and fantasies, enacted or not, and whether or not they find institutional substantiation.

The nineteenth-century political novel poses a continuing challenge to literary critics and literary historians. Whether identified as “the industrial novel,” “the social-problem novel,” or, the denomination I favor, “the political novel,” this particular genre has proved notoriously dificult to characterize and to classify. Generally, novels are placed into this category because they treat conditions and crises occasioned by the industrial revolution in Britain: the discontent and misery of the working classes; the negative effects of a world increasingly dominated by machinery, alienated labor, and the profit motive; and, not least, the impact of worker uprisings, strikes, and violence (with the example of the French Revolution always in the background). Beyond this constellation of concerns, there is one other key feature of the mid-nineteenth century political novel in England – it tends to position itself as an intervention. In addressing the problems it exposes, that is, the political novel profiers some sort of solution, even if that solution is only the reading of the novel itself (which thereby allows for insight into under-recognized problems, or prompts sympathy for suffering, or otherwise effects a transformation in the reader that might enable a constructive approach to the problems depicted). The nineteenth-century political novel is, in a word, typically sincere, regardless of its ideological orientation.

While there was an Arab revivalism in the last decades of the nineteenth century against both the Ottoman legacy and the colonial onslaught, the actual impact of the revivalists was limited to endeavours to combat colonial discourse and to consolidate the use of the Arabic language through educational institutions and the reprinting of classical texts like the ones edited by Shaykh Muḥsammad ‘Abdu (d. 1905). On a general and more practical level, the elite, including the military officers who were trained in Istanbul, were more receptive to a European model of a nation state with lip service to Arab culture and Islam. The absence in educational institutions – and even among writers and clerics who were dubbed as ‘religious mendicants’ by Lloyd – of a thorough engagement with the sacred in one’s culture, including religious thought, and classical or Qur’ānic rhetoric, is very conspicuous. This absence clears the ground for a counter-Europeanized outlook and undertaking manifested in the pervasive elitist reception of the European Enlightenment discourse, especially its landmarks in philosophy, sociology and education, such as Herbert Spencer’s On Education (translated in 1908), John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Darwin’s Origin of Species and hundreds of books in different fields of knowledge. The Turco-Albanian Egyptian ruler Muḥammad ‘Ali had already established the School of Languages, Madrasat al-alsun (1835), for this purpose. His project must not be seen as limited to Egypt, because he and, especially, his son Ibrahim worked and fought for an Arab empire with a centre in Cairo, as his conquests in Arabia and Syria demonstrate.

In the 1940s West Indian fiction was virtually unknown to English and Caribbean readers alike. Writing in 1960, George Lamming could describe the West Indian novelist as someone “who had no existence twenty years ago.” A few isolated expatriates – Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and Eric Walrond – had published important texts in the 1920s and 1930s, but their work had been absorbed into Anglo-American traditions, suggesting little vibrant, continuous literary culture in the region. In the 1950s, however, West Indian literature suddenly seemed ubiquitous, and exuberantly selfconscious. Between 1949 (with Vic Reid's New Day) and 1960, over sixty novels by West Indian writers were released, nearly all of them in London. This led observers to predict a fundamental shift toward Commonwealth literature, as it was then known. As early as 1952 the Times Literary Supplement expresses hope that “the new generation of West Indian writers” might infuse parochial and inbred English literary culture with much needed fresh blood: “Perhaps in 10, certainly in 20 years from now, West Indian and African literature in the English language should be an accepted part of our, Commonwealth cultural scene.” By the end of the decade, West Indian writers were earning strong endorsements from London's most influential literary people.

The law, woven inextricably into the fabric of eighteenth-century English life, exercised a pervasive presence across social ranks. For most persons the law served as their main exposure to government and politics, but its associations stretched far beyond governance and state affairs. Literal and figurative reminders of the law passed every day before the eyes of the English populace in the form of public executions, marriage settlements, bankruptcies, gaming restrictions, debtors' prisons, land enclosures, wills, navy press gangs, deeds of ownership, estate disputes, to list only a few. Those and similar reminders also filled the pages of eighteenth-century fictional narratives. Reworked as plot devices, thematic threads, or instruments of verisimilitude, matters of law infused fictional narratives with the stuff of lived experience and contributed to their persuasiveness “that all is real.” It is perhaps unremarkable that eighteenth-century novels, given their concern with replicating the real of everyday experience, embraced the law. More noteworthy but less acknowledged is the extent to which the law embraced fiction.

Fictions of law arose “to resolve novel legal questions through arguments of equivalence and creative analogical reasoning”; they signify “the growing pains of the language of the law.” As English society shed its feudal past and moved steadily to a capitalist mode of operation, its legal system remained rooted in its medieval origins. When new situations occurred that existing laws either did not cover or could not handle adequately, fictions were devised and treated as fact in order to circumvent the inconveniences or inadequacies occasioned by outmoded jurisprudence.

Rules for formatting the publication of prose include: a rectangular block of print; random, moot line breaks, which are accidents of printing; word-density on the page, crowded by comparison with most verse; arbitrary page breaks, numbered independently of the originating manuscript; and nets or lacings of white spaces between words and sentences. There is another condition, due to prose's printed format: any reprinted prose text past or future can reposition words on the page (higher, lower, left, right, centered).

Those elements make a mental picture of prose for us. We would usually recognize a prose page, as well as verse or a statistical table, from across a room. The picture might be at work though not thought about most of the time while we read. The surface shapes and rules of prose might also be an unconscious force acting on the history of thought. The neutral givens of prose could be prompts, though not imperatives, toward certain kinds of thinking. Intermittently, and by secondary gestures, novelists perhaps have represented the regulating conditions of their own prose medium. They have sometimes worked the look of the prose page understatedly into a general figurativeness, so that prose's seemingly neutral shapes ground the themes and interpretations of the novelists' worlds. The everyday prose page – not the illuminated or typographically daring one, but the minimal, recognizable least square of common print – amounts to a paradox of hypertrophied ordinariness, of what is “most ordinary,” a condition to be reinterpreted by novels.

“You mean that she is too scientific? So long as she remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too scientific? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of the age.” Thus Theodora defends her heroine, George Eliot, in Henry James's wittily ambivalent “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation.” Whether or not it was the highest form of culture, the idea of science is hardly less evident in the Victorian era than the effects of its application. Periodicals and the daily press carried reports on scientific meetings and disputes; Nature, dedicated to science, began publishing in 1869. Scientific societies sprang up or reformed themselves, laid claim to new premises or expanded old ones. Enthusiastic amateurs collected fossils, explored rock pools, and gazed at the stars, or stayed indoors to read such bestsellers as Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology (1838), Charles Kingsley's Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (1855), and Richard Proctor's Essays on Astronomy (1872). Museums, exhibitions, and demonstrations attracted large audiences, while popular lecture series turned professional men of science like Faraday, Tyndall, and Huxley into public figures.

Meanwhile, the notion of what constitutes science was being revised. Originally a synonym for the state of knowing, by around 1700 “science” had come to denote knowledge acquired by study, and more especially an organized body of knowledge, consisting of defined terms, coherent proofs, and regular laws. It is in this sense that political economy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology would later establish themselves as sciences of human behavior.

Our problem is that we did not invent printing or the Bic pen, and that we’ll always end up at the bottom of the class thinking we could write the history of our continent with spears. Do you get my drift? And what is more, we have a bizarre accent that comes out in our writing, and people don’t care for it.

Introduction: framing postcolonial France

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British and the French shared the ambiguous prestige of wielding the most powerful empires and colonies. Their respective projects varied considerably in terms of geographic spheres of influence, and naturally so did the cultural strategies deployed. Any consideration of the legacy of these historical encounters must necessarily acknowledge these factors, particularly when one analyses the mutually constitutive nature of cross-cultural contact between these regions of the world. The shared historical experience needs to be foregrounded: ‘France and Africa share a common history, expressed jointly by the role France has played for centuries in Africa north and south of the Sahara, and by the more recent presence in the Hexagon of Africans who have, in turn, through their actions, their work, their thinking, had a concrete impact on the course of French history.’ In this regard, the French context is all the more complex given the concerted effort made by the colonial authorities in shaping policy through a civilizing mission determined to establish cultural prototypes in France overseas.

Afrikaans writers of the 1930s

The two main figures who interpreted the renewal brought to Afrikaans literature by the Dertigers (Poets of the Thirties) were N. P. van Wyk Louw (1906–70), the most prominent Dertiger, and D. J. Opperman (1914–85), who appeared on the literary scene about a decade after him. Both these poets were also academics and men of letters. Due to their erudition and sound judgement their views on Afrikaans literature and its historical development gained lasting authority. Van Wyk Louw entered the discursive arena at key moments to decisively shift the debate, as he did at the beginning of the 1960s in Vernuwing in die Prosa (Innovation in Fiction).Opperman's defining anthology Groot Verseboek (Great Book of Verse), first published in 1951, survives up to the present and has had a huge influence in shaping literary tastes. In different ways Van Wyk Louw and Opperman established a canon that would remain virtually unchallenged for many years. As late as 1969, for example, Ernst van Heerden's essay on nationalism and literature (‘Nasionalisme en Literatuur’, pp. 22–44) largely reiterates ideas formulated by VanWyk Louw thirty years earlier.

Van Wyk Louw and Opperman were key figures in the establishment of a new cast in the Afrikaans literary world: that of the literary critic. In their writings and those of contemporaries such as H. A. Mulder (1906–49), W. E. G. Louw (1913–80) and Gerrit Dekker (1887–1973), the patriotically supportive literary culture of previous generations was replaced by a more erudite, demanding, combative and comparative approach.

The novel and other disciplines

Lawrence 's description of the novel genre as “the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered” encapsulates the dialogisms, hybridities, intertextualities, double voicings, and focalization that are celebrated by recent academic criticism. Scholarship thereby constructs the novel as a capacious house, not only full of many windows, but also built ergonomically, with a range of recycled materials. Of course, the novel has never respected disciplinary boundaries, national frontiers, or well-tilled fields and plots; but in the twentieth century its tendencies have seemed ever more promiscuous, democratic, and miscegenated. Novelists, like public intellectuals, have roamed free of academic practices (even when those practices appear not to be restrictive), borrowing and stealing at will, mixing and meshing, parodying and inverting official discourses of knowledge.

Popular science and philosophy, earlier in the century and again from the late 1970s on, after the publication of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976), have been similarly free ranging, making new ideas easily available to readers. In the earlier part of the century, new scientific ideas were liberated from academically circumscribed contexts, and made accessible in Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1928) and James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe (1930). Popular series like the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (from 1911) conveyed Einstein, Russell, Jeans, Eddington, Freud, Bergson, and Nietzsche to a new and educationally aspirational middle class.