The Bildungsroman, or novel of self-development, is often said to have originated in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795), and to have crossed the Channel in Thomas Carlyle's famous 1824 translation. However, it is tempting to include in a history of the English Bildungsroman earlier literary landmarks such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), Clarissa (1748), Tom Jones (1749), Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), the novels of Fanny Burney and a number of those of Scott and Austen. Indeed, the fact that most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels are deeply concerned with self-development suggests that the term Bildungsroman should be considered as describing a central tendency of the English novel sui generis. Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister coincided with intensified focus on inward psychological development, as opposed to outward adventures and progress, and the nineteenth-century heyday of the Bildungsroman in English saw significant formal developments tailored to the intensification.

The very unlikeness of Wilhelm Meister to any English Bildungsroman that precedes or follows it points toward the particularities of the English species. Wilhelm's story, like that of the heroes of Scott's Rob Roy (1818) or Thackeray's Pendennis (1848–1850), begins with his struggle to escape a humdrum bourgeois future in favor of a romantic alternative. But Wilhelm inherits a large fortune, and thereby comes to inhabit a social dimension in which rules of conduct are extremely flexible. In contrast English heroes typically find their desires and choices radically constrained by economic realities and sociomoral codes. The economic, moral, and social constraints, or the lack of them, have great formal implications.

In March 1956, the popular writer Colin MacInnes published an essay in the journal Twentieth Century titled ‘A short guide for Jumbles’. The essay was in the form of an imaginary dialogue between a white British citizen – the ‘Jumble’ of the title, a corruption of ‘John Bull’ – and MacInnes, who proceeded to explain and advocate for the presence of postwar Britain’s new African, Caribbean and South Asian populations. In answering questions such as ‘why do they come here?’ and ‘is there a colour bar in England?’ MacInnes involves himself in two tasks simultaneously: providing the Jumble with an impression of how Britain’s latest migrants see host peoples, and offering a sympathetic if combative account of the fortunes of the migrants that is ultimately intended to challenge racist and prejudicial views. Standing between native and newcomer, acting as a way of opening an enlightening envisioning of one to the other, MacInnes occupies an unsteady but illuminating vantage point. Born in London in 1914, he was raised in Australia and only returned to the county of his birth in 1931, settling in London after World War II. Neither native Londoner nor New Commonwealth migrant, MacInnes considered himself ‘partly a foreigner’ when he returned to London as a young man and described himself as a perpetual ‘inside-outsider’ due to his Australian upbringing. Thus, he was both within but to one side of the Britain about which he wrote in his journalism and fiction, and in contrast to those who felt that the nation was threatened by immigration (both at the time and since) he prized keenly Britain’s new migratory multicultural admixture.

Throughout the nineteenth century novelists rework the devices of eighteenthcentury gothic into new forms of sensational extremity: monster stories from Frankenstein (1818) to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897), stories of crime and detection from Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) to the Newgate novel and Sherlock Holmes. Even historical fiction fromScott andHogg to Ainsworth and Reade is gothicized. Whether they appear as preternatural fantasy in the demonic bargains made by Melmoth and Dorian Gray or as scandalous disruptions of mid-Victorian domesticity in the sensation novel, sensational disturbances are always woven into the larger fabric of nineteenth-century fiction. Their extremity is in constant dialogue with the programmatic moderation of realism.

That dialogue already shapes the first “Gothic Story,” Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole calls it “an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” offsetting the traditional romance's “imagination and improbability” with the novel's realistic fidelity to “nature,” while “leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention.” This liberating opportunity works in tension, however, with paranoid plotting that enacts an uncanny return of the repressed in its imaginative revival of outmoded superstitions and its supernatural retributions, visiting the sins of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generation. Both forms of return, intimations of the preternatural and insistent exposure of past transgressions, animate the fiction that emerges from the ruins of Walpole's haunted castle.

The names of a small number of South African writers are familiar around the globe: they include Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Wilbur Smith and J. M. Coetzee. Others, such as Zakes Mda, Damon Galgut, Njabulo Ndebele, Antjie Krog, Marlene van Niekerk, Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb, have growing international reputations. Earlier periods recorded fame for writers whose stars have now faded, among them Sarah Gertrude Millin, Daphne Rooke and Laurens van der Post. Many South Africans have gone on to make names for themselves in other countries: among authors well known in the United Kingdom, for instance, are Dan Jacobson, Barbara Trapido, James McClure, Christopher Hope, Justin Cartwright and Tom Sharpe.

A roll-call of this sort, however, gives very little sense of the range and richness of South Africa's literary output. Several literary traditions, oral and written, have fed into the complex array of verbal productions charted in this volume, at times influencing or infiltrating one another, and at other times ignoring or challenging one another. From indigenous folk-tales to European elite art, these traditions have been constantly reworked and reinvented, creating an extensive body of literary art that continues to grow, despite the smallness of the home market and the very limited financial means of most potential readers. South Africa's fraught political history, with its continual inroads into the lives of ordinary people, has given rise to remarkable literary achievements while at the same time skewing the institutional processes whereby works of literature are produced and disseminated.

Let us begin by reminding ourselves of where the efficacy of genre analysis of literaryworks of art lies. It lies, Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism, inits capacity for illuminating the ‘traditions and affinities’ that literary conventions invoke. For our purposes one of the interesting things to note about Frye’s argument is that he deduces it, in part, from a consideration of literary works that inscribe the spoken word. Thus, he points out that in using a narrator Joseph Conrad assimilates writing to speech; and that in using the epic invocation in Paradise Lost John Milton suggests that the most intimate affinities of the genre also lie with speech. So Frye’s argument locates the efficacy of genre analysis in its facility for contextualizing the relationship between a specific text and others, both literary and oral, within a tradition. Although his examples consist of literary works that use the oral, it does not, thereby, prohibit a consideration of oral texts that invoke the literary. Thus Frye’s argument opens up to us the space required to pose and address several questions concerning orality and the genres of African postcolonial writing. What generic affinities exist between orality and literacy in African postcolonial writing? How do African postcolonial oral and literary works inscribe the conventions of orality and literacy? What, specifically, is postcolonial about these generic conventions?

There are four points that must be made early about South Asian English poetry. First, the category of South Asia, while convenient, may do dis-service to those nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh, whose very raison d’être is their separateness from India and each other. The second is that these three countries do share a common political, literary and cultural history with India (as do Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan) and therefore need to be distinguished only after 1947; hence, this chapter will look at pre-independence subcontinental poetry as a separate category, while looking at post-independence poetry in terms of the nations. The third is that Indian English poetry dominates the others in South Asia, having a much larger corpus. The fourth is that though we are dealing with South Asian English poetry, no such English really exists or is used by the poets except for comic purposes.

Pre-independence subcontinental poetry

The subcontinent saw the flowering of Indian English poetry very early (travel memoirs came even earlier) – in the 1820s. To give a sense of perspective, the British Empire was thirty-odd years away, as were the first universities in India; Macaulay’s famous ‘Minute on Indian Education’ would be written in 1835 and implemented even later. But the East India Company was already in India, and the people of Kolkata (known as Calcutta till recently), which was a cauldron of languages, races, and commercial and cultural possibilities, had already decided that English would be the language of power and emancipation.

As South Africa hurtled towards its third national democratic election in 2009 an old anti-apartheid struggle song jostled with poetry and songs from the long oral tradition to bolster the public images of politicians. At rallies the leader of the largest political party led supporters in singing ‘Umshini wami’ (‘My machine [gun]’), a song with a long career in the underground camps of the liberation struggle. The song was imbued with new meanings and sung with relish by those seeking to voice popular dissatisfaction with the perceived failures of the state and of political leadership (Gunner, ‘Jacob Zuma’, pp. 28, 30). The same song had in the preceding months been transformed into countless cellular telephone ringtones by entrepreneurs seeing a popular cultural phenomenon out of which to score sales. Sound and video clips of singing crowds were also heard and seen on radio and television. At the same time debate raged under trees, in offices, on numerous blogs, news websites, and on radio and television talk shows about the public uses of a song with an illustrious history of galvanising fighters for justice by a politician whose post-liberation character was allegedly dubious. To add to the maelstrom of reinvented cultural idioms and symbols, some of the politicians were being lauded in praise poetry, izibongo, and songs in the maskanda genre performed at live concerts. The poetry and music were recorded and disseminated through fast-selling compact discs.

Representative instances: Woolf, Storm Jameson, Lessing, Attia Hosain

While women writers have long been established as contributors to the history of the novel, the sixty-year period covered by this chapter traces developments in experimentation with the novel as a form, and as a vehicle for new and challenging content. Women, now having greater access to education, respond both to the aesthetic debates of the day, and to rapid changes in their cultural, social, and political context. Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, Doris Lessing, and Attia Hosain demonstrate the range of women novelists' achievements over a greater part of the century.

Virginia Woolf develops during the 1920s a major tool of modernist writers pioneered by Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair: the stream of consciousness that reflects the mind's interior monologue. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf asks whether the novel is as yet “rightly shaped” for the woman writer's use, given that the form has been dominated by male authors. She is in no doubt that the woman writer will soon adapt novelistic form to her own purposes, “providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her. For it is the poetry that is still denied outlet.” Accordingly, in The Waves (1931) Woolf develops poetic devices (such as repeated rhythms and phrases, together with image clusters) that explore the minds of six friends growing from childhood into adulthood. Each phase of their lives is interspersed with lyrical descriptions of sea and seasons, mirroring their maturation – and the simultaneous aging of the British Empire.

In a celebrated series of essays written in a burst of intellectual and creative energy in the mid 1980s, Njabulo Ndebele set out some key terms for considering the history, trajectory and imperatives of South African literature. Some of these terms – ‘spectacle’, ‘interiority’, ‘information’, ‘counsel’ – will come up again for discussion in this chapter, as will the wider resonances of Ndebele's contribution. Beyond the terms themselves, however, there is a deeper – one might say foundational – aspect in Ndebele's approach, which may be even more significant in considering writing in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s – the long decade of its ‘interregnum’ through the final years of apartheid. It is an aspect on one level simple, but nonetheless profound – that Ndebele established a perspective for considering the history of South African literature on formal grounds. Moreover, these were not the formal or generic grounds of standard literary history – realism, romanticism, experimentalism – though such terms can and do have their place. Rather, these formal terms had to do with what informed South African writing – what shaped it, gave it perspective: its own versions of ‘interiority’, as it were.

The implicit challenge in Ndebele's formal approach has not much been taken up in the writing of South African literary history, but along with a number of other patterns in the period, it does allow us to reach towards certain features at the heart of the era.

Travel and colonialism

Travel and travel narratives shaped the way we understand the colonial and postcolonial world, and their importance to postcolonial studies has generated several book-length accounts in recent years. Colonialism encompasses the stories of many kinds of travellers with many motives, European merchant venturers, colonial officials, explorers, missionaries, settlers and others become bound together with people of the colonized spaces, who themselves, as we will see, engaged in travel between their homelands and the world beyond.

Colonization may have begun, as was once remarked of the acquisition of the British Empire, ‘in a fit of absent-mindedness’, but it rapidly evolved into a way of consolidating these encounters in an emerging structure of conscious power and dominance. In the same way the early, random stories of encounter, which emerged as Europeans moved out to new lands, rapidly evolved into accounts that sought to impose European patterns and ideas on the experience of their expanding physical world. A full account of colonial travel literature might best begin by analysing some of the early ways the world was represented by these first random travellers beyond the then known world and how their narratives both shaped the imaginations of those who followed and inspired their curiosity and their cupidity. It might also consider how travel narratives began to shift the perspectives of Europeans as they began to embrace the wider horizons the travellers and their accounts brought home.

Women's writing spans the periods, concerns, genres, languages and media addressed in this collection. The purpose of this chapter is not so much to provide a detailed overview of women's writing in South Africa – an impossible task within the space constraints – as to sketch out landmark publications, attending to the emergence of the female autograph and the ways in which women write women within and/or against feminist and national discourses, while exploring the following questions: Through what devices, tropes and reconstructed genealogies have women writers laid claim to artistry, authorship and textual authority? How do they represent the category of ‘women’ and inscribe national identity within a fractured, divided and heterogeneous polity? What representational strategies do they develop to unpick the ‘patchwork quilt of patriarchies’ (Bozzoli, ‘Marxism’, pp. 149, 155) in South Africa?

The female autograph and the nation: Schreiner and Mgqwetho

Situated on opposite sides of the colonial divide, taking up different generic approaches and grappling with divergent concerns, Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) and Nontsizi Mgqwetho (published during the 1920s; date of birth and death unknown) enter into print culture an emergent national and feminist consciousness, while negotiating female authorship. The fate of their respective oeuvres is indicative of the differential challenges women have faced in coming into and remaining in print in South Africa. Schreiner's first novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), was an immediate success and has achieved canonical status, yet it was first published under a male pseudonym (Ralph Iron).

Negritude can be defined as an aesthetic and literary movement that began in the 1930s. It centred on the creative and expressive potential of black consciousness, and through its transnational scope became one of the pre-emptive cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Abiola Irele has proffered a comprehensive definition of Negritude as a ground-breaking literary and cultural phenomenon whose primary accomplishment was the validation and valorization of a wide-ranging black aesthetic. He writes,

Negritude was engendered and flourished in Paris in the mid 1930s, largely as a response to the implicit superiority of white colonizing cultures; it was led and fed by the writings of two black scholars from the French colonies, Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. Both of these colonial subjects would go on to become major literary figures, and each would play a leading role in the political life of their respective countries of origin; Senghor became the first president of an independent Senegal, and Césaire served simultaneously as mayor of the Martiniquan capital, Fort-de-France, and as Martinique’s representative in the French National Assembly for over forty-five years.

As it is the case with most keywords, critical discussions of magical realism should not avoid asking questions about the history, geography and cultural politics of the concepts and practices at stake in such examinations. When was the concept of magical realism articulated? Is magical realism a Latin American or a universal aesthetic form? And what is the cultural, historical and political relation of magical realism with the discourse of postcolonialism? Scholars are in general agreement about the facts, but often differ on how to interpret them. How can we make sense of the fact that the first critic to think about magical realism as an aesthetic category was a German art critic, Franz Roh (1890–1965), and not the Latin Americans Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001) and Alejo Carpentier (1904–60)? What does this transatlantic (pre)history of the concept of magical realism say about the particularist (peripheral, Third World, postcolonial) claims or universalist inscriptions of this narrative form? Answers to these questions vary, but what seems to be missing in the vast bibliography on magical realism that started growing exponentially since the mid 1980s is a historical narrative of how magical realism was transformed from a narrowly defined concept capable of explaining the scope of post-expressionist painting in Franz Roh; to the aesthetic that was supposed to define the Latin American cultural difference in Uslar Pietri and Carpentier, and later in Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1927); to finally come to be seen, as Homi Bhabha suggested, as ‘the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world’. This chapter will trace the transcultural genealogy of a critical concept and aesthetic form through its various articulations prior to its becoming the highly celebrated postcolonial form we know today.

‘It was as if a Briton, of the time of Severus, had suddenly written a poem in good Latin’, read the 1829 Oriental Herald Review appraisal of the 1827 and 1829 volumes of Henry Derozio’s poetry. This was high praise indeed by a reviewer (quite possibly the editor of the Oriental Herald, J.S. Buckingham) who had earlier puzzled over the viability of Indian writing in English: ‘the very language … can hardly be called English’. The poet in question was Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a Calcutta ‘Eurasian’ of Portuguese and Indian ancestry, and a pioneer Indian English writer. Derozio’s poems imagined and apostrophized a unified India from the limited scope of the plains of ‘Bhaugulpore’ or the rock of ‘Jungheera’ and gave tremulous form to its nascent nationalist imagination. Derozio’s elegiac poems of India situate him as a belated arrival to the once glorious but now subjugated country. In ‘The Harp of India’ (March 1827), for instance, he writes:

Derozio’s ‘postcoloniality’ inheres not in dates but in the postimperial tone of the nationalist poetry. And his enthusiastic appropriation of the English literary canon to write of the emancipation of India testifies to the predicament of the postcolonial writer, whose conscious or unconscious affiliation and allusiveness to the Western literary tradition is an inheritance that is often as unwanted as it is laboured for.

Introduction

The connections between autobiography and the postcolonial are profound. Postcolonial studies has brought political concerns to bear on literary texts, showing not only how such texts respond to structures of power and privilege, but also how they may play a part in creating or contesting such structures. In parallel, autobiography studies takes as its object a series of texts that cannot simply be addressed in formalist terms, that insist on their referentiality even as they form new subjectivities, both individual and collective, for writers and readers. Parallel battles over terminology, indeed, indicate intersecting disciplinary tensions. As Ato Quayson’s introduction illustrates, debates over the inclusion of the hyphen in ‘post(-)colonial’ arise from discussions over whether the term marks a temporal or an epistemological rupture. Auto/biography studies, similarly, has recently made greater use of the terms ‘auto/biography’ and ‘life writing’ as concepts more inclusive than Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as ‘a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his [sic] own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality’, widening attention to a variety of forms in different social and cultural contexts. At the same time, others have insisted on the specificity of ‘autobiography’ as a particular modern genre promoting individual subjectification, and constituting a site of struggle over redefined individual and communal identities in modern society.

Sir Walter Scott's perceived “Scottishness” has been a handicap to the understanding of his work in the postwar world. The rise of an aestheticized vision of the Romantic period, combined with a focus on the Coleridgean imagination and the Lake Poets in general, rerouted Romantic criticism away from its origins in language, politics, and society and towards the realms of transcendent vision. Scott and Burns suffered more from this shift than other Romantic writers in the British Isles, and the situation was not relieved by a turn in the focus of Romantic criticism in the 1980s towards a historicist approach and enlarged canon. Whereas in the 1930s Scott's novels were being set at School Certificate for pupils in English schools, in the 1980s it was not unknown for English academics to believe that he was almost impenetrable to their undergraduates. Nor was the situation in Scotland better, despite the launch of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley novels in 1985, a project which initiated a new wave in the textual editing of Scotland's major authors. Signs of revival in North America have not yet significantly altered this picture.

Scott is commonly credited with inventing the historical novel. This is the case made by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel (1936-1937; English translation, 1962). Lukács argues that historical settings in novels that predate Scott (mostly gothic or quasi-gothic novels) do not acknowledge periodicity, which Scott achieves by portraying “the struggles and antagonisms of history by means of characters who always represent social trends and historical forces.”

The English novel since Defoe has oriented itself toward new technologies and media. It has thrived on the social relations sustained by shifting communications networks, whether they have been the epistolary habits and private couriers of the eighteenth century, the nascent print capitalism and circulating libraries of the imperial nation state, or the solidifying technological matrix of Victorian Britain's Penny Post, telegraphs, and railroads. The conventions of literary realism perhaps had to do more with the novel's formal accommodation to adjacent systems of communication (the postage stamp, the telegraph) and transportation than with any progressive attainment of truth. Beyond realism, the “sensation” novels of the later nineteenth century are, according to Nicholas Daly, “the first subgenre in which a Bradshaw's railway schedule and a watch become necessary to the principal characters … The pleasures of fictional suspense and the anxieties of clock-watching appear as part of the same historical moment.” And from the telegraphic era to the computer era, the “effort to describe … in a far more ‘life-like’, complex, and detailed way than literature had ever done before becomes an attempt to incorporate, mimic, or co-opt the achievements of competing electric media.” The novel has absorbed these technologies into its substance through aesthetic trial and error, a process that argues the primacy of “refraction” over “reflection” in the novel's relationship to its rivals.

In the 1950s the most popular literary form for publication was the short story: stories were not only the staple of magazines, which themselves formed a staple of entertainment before the advent of television, but were also frequently gathered into anthologies, often for schools. Black writers' attraction to the form has usually been explained by its hospitality to those who lacked the domestic space, privacy and leisure time, and perhaps the literary confidence, too, required for novels, but crucial, also, in the 1950s was the publishing opportunity provided by Drum magazine, which has given to this period the name the ‘Drum decade’. However, Lewis Nkosi's term ‘fabulous’ in his essay ‘The Fabulous Decade’ encapsulates the period's extraordinary atmosphere of romantic self-construction. Young black intellectuals, writing in English, were entering a modernity that seemed, still, theirs for the taking, and a small white avant-garde (mostly English-speaking but also including young Afrikaners) were eager to associate with them or to affiliate through writing, as if their combined presence could reverse – like a fable – the effects of apartheid.

Underpinned as it was by a liberal humanist ethos, the predominant mode of the English-language culture of the 1950s was literary realism of the kind that valorised witness and protest: art was subjugated to life. (The term ‘realism’ includes Georg Lukács's critical or bourgeois realism, naturalism, social realism and other variants.)