Academic literature on the topic 'Botswanan literature (English) – History and criticism'

AbstractThis article considers the contentious invocations of history that have become prominent in debates about English public law. It presents them as uses of history not simply to understand English public law but to reform it, through the reconstruction of historic authorities or reappraisal of historical sources. This article addresses the criticism they have attracted by distinguishing different kinds of orthodox and unorthodox reformist history. It advocates their transparent use and thoroughly deliberative history for reformist purposes in public law. It does so in three distinctive ways: first, by suggesting implications of Coke's dictum on causal understanding for whig historical approaches in the common law; secondly, by reassessing Maitland's dichotomy between the lawyer's logic of authority and the historian's logic of evidence; and, thirdly, by arguing that much can be learnt from the methodological caution, deliberation and rigour promoted by comparativists in their developed literature on legal transplants and law reform.

Since 2007, a team of American and British ancient historians has been preparing a new translation of theCodex Justinianus. The ‘Codex Project’ was launched by chief editor Bruce W. Frier; the goal of the project is to create the first reliable English translation of theCodex Justinianuson the basis of the standard edition by Paul Krüger. Since 1932, the notoriously unreliable translation by Scott has remained the only one in English. The new translation by the Codex Project should appear soon.

Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2015
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative reading of post-colonial literature written in English in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to bring into focus the similarities and differences between fictional representations of poverty in these three countries. The thesis explores the unique way in which literature may contribute to the better understanding of poverty, a field that has hitherto been largely dominated by scholarship that relies on quantitative analysis as opposed to qualitative approaches. The thesis seeks to use examples from selected texts to illustrate that (as many social scientists have argued before) literature provides insights into the ‘lived realities’ of the poor and that with its vividly imagined specificities it illuminates the broad generalisations about poverty established in other (data-gathering) disciplines. Selected texts from the three countries destabilise the usual categories of gender, race and class which are often utilised in quantitative studies of poverty and by so doing show that experiences of poverty cut across and intersect all of these spheres and the experiences differ from one person to another regardless of which category they may fall within. The three main chapters focus primarily on local indigence as depicted by texts from the three countries. The selection of texts in the chapters follows a thematic approach and texts are discussed by means of selective focus on the ways in which they address the theme of poverty. Using three main theorists – Maria Pia Lara, Njabulo Ndebele and Amartya Sen – the thesis focuses centrally on how writers use varying literary devices and techniques to provide moving depictions of poverty that show rather than tell the reader of the unique experiences that different characters and different communities have of deprivation and shortage of basic needs.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis onderneem ‘n vergelykende studie van post-koloniale letterkunde in Engels uit Botswana, Namibië en Zimbabwe, om sodoende die ooreenstemmings en verskille tussen letterkundige uitbeeldings van armoede in hierdie drie lande aan die lig te bring. Die tesis ondersoek die unieke manier waarop letterkunde kan bydra tot ‘n beter begrip van armoede, ‘n studieveld wat tot huidiglik grotendeels op kwantitatiewe analises berus, in teenstelling met kwalitatiewe benaderings. Die tesis se werkswyse gebruik voorbeelde uit gelekteerde tekste met die doel om te illustreer (soos verskeie sosiaal-wetenskaplikes reeds aangevoer het) dat letterkunde insig voorsien in die lewenservarings van armoediges en dat dit die breë veralgemenings aangaande armoede in ander (data-gebaseerde) wetenskappe kan illumineer. Geselekteerde tekste uit die drie lande destabiliseer die gewone kategorieë van gender, ras en klas wat normaaalweg gebruik word in kwantitatiewe studies van armoede, om sodoende aan te toon dat die ervaring van armoede dwarsdeur hierdie klassifikasies sny en dat hierdie tipe lewenservaring verskil van persoon tot persoon ongeag in watter kategorie hulle geplaas word. Die drie sentrale hoofstukke fokus primêr op lokale armoede soos uitgebeeld in tekste vanuit die drie lande. Die seleksie van tekste in die hoofstukke volg ‘n tematiese patroon en tekste word geanaliseer na aanleiding van ‘n selektiewe fokus op die maniere waarop hulle armoede uitbeeld. Deur gebruik te maak van ‘ die teorieë van Maria Pia Lara, Njabulo Ndebele en Amartya Sen, fokus hierdie tesis sentraal op hoe skrywers verskeie literêre metodes en tegnieke aanwend ten einde ontroerende uitbeeldings van armoede te skep wat die leser wys liewer as om hom/haar slegs te vertel aangaande die unieke ervarings wat verskillende karakters en gemeenskappe het van ontbering en die tekort aan basiese behoefte-voorsiening.

This thesis argues that as historians of English-Canadian poetry, A. J. M. Smith, John Sutherland, Northrop Frye, and Desmond Pacey explicitly promote the value of past conflict reconciled into present harmony. They do so by claiming that such reconciliation marks the maturity of English-Canadian culture. This thesis also argues, however, that the interactive progression of their histories implicitly undermines this value. It does so because each critic appreciates a different group of poets for realizing their shared cultural ideal, thereby establishing contradictory representations of what they all claim to be the culmination of English-Canadian literary history. The thesis concludes that while their lingering sense of present cultural maturity should now be fully renounced, the value these critics place on reconciliation is well worth preserving and transforming.

All the major critics of postwar literature regard the fifties as a period in which literature was inept, conservative and conformist. This thesis argues that fifties literature was instead an active and successful agent in problematising conservative political orthodoxies, and in articulating alternative identities and politics. The study is concerned with two major themes: the relationship between literature and history, and the critical reputation and location of literature in nineteen-fifties Britain. It begins from positions that are already evident in postwar literary criticism towards both of these themes. Literature is understood in much of the critical writing of postwar Britain to be representative of social trends and attitudes, and its meaning is determined largely according to particular understandings of postwar British history and society. The literary text, if understood as 'representative', is capable of offering the reader direct access to the society of its production, and of reflecting the dominant trends and attitudes in a given period. Because it is the most recent period of realism in the history of English literature, the fifties seem to be particularly susceptible to this view. Reading fifties literature in the light of poststructuralist thinking on textuality and representation, this study argues that literature is not representative bu negotiates identities and social experiences of the fifties in a much more diverse way. These negotiations are demonstrated in readings of the work of John Osborne, Brendan Behan and Sam Selvon, and elaborated theoretically in the concluding chapters of the study. Literature's Poor Relation demonstrates that fifties literature is able to manoeuvre into a space wherein it can articulate oppositional and critical stances towards power, by firstly, imitating social detail and literary traditions, and secondly, reading these details and traditions in such was as to deconstruct them. The appearance of representativeness serves to seduce the reader into desiring the text (the idea that Look Back in Anger was representative attracted many of its original audiences to see it), and its readings and interpretations of history and identity deflect the reader's desire towards oppositional and critical moments in the text.

This thesis is the first ever survey of Shetland’s literature. The large body of material the thesis covers is not well known, and, apart from Walter Scott’s 1822 novel The Pirate, and Hugh MacDiarmid’s sojourn in the archipelago, Shetland is not a presence in any account of Scottish writing. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ has been written to address this absence. Who are Shetland’s writers? And what have they written? These are the fundamental questions this thesis answers. By paying close attention to Shetland’s writers, ‘The Literature of Shetland’ extends the geographical territory of the Scottish canon. ‘The Literature of Shetland’ covers a chronological period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Virtually no creative poetry or prose, either written or oral, survives in Shetland from before this time so, after a brief discussion of the fragmentary pre-nineteenth century sources, the thesis discusses the archipelago’s literature in eight chronologically arranged chapters. Chapter One concentrates on a group of three obscure early nineteenth-century Shetland authors – Margaret Chalmers, Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Thomas Irvine – and also explores Scott’s involvement with the northern isles. Chapters Two and Three discuss an important period at the end of the nineteenth century, in which books and newspapers were published in Shetland for the first time, and in which a number of pioneering and influential local writers emerged. Jessie M.E. Saxby became the first professional writer from Shetland and, in the work of George Stewart, James Stout Angus, Basil Anderson, and especially J.J. Haldane Burgess, the Shetland dialect developed as a serious literary idiom. These writers laid down foundations for much of what came next. Chapter Four discusses the end of this period of growth, with James Inkster posed as the last significant figure of his generation, and the war poet John Peterson as the first local writer to depart from the literary principles which developed in the Victorian era. Chapter Five looks at the work Hugh MacDiarmid did in Shetland from 1933-1942. MacDiarmid is not really part of the narrative of the thesis, but the work he produced in the isles is vast. Because he does not need to be introduced in the way the other writers do, this chapter takes a different approach to the rest of the thesis and looks at MacDiarmid’s Shetland-era work alongside that of Charles Doughty. Doughty was a crucial presence for MacDiarmid during his time in the isles, and considering their work together opens up a better understanding of the work MacDiarmid did in Shetland. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the second major period of growth in Shetland’s literature, focussing on the writers associated with the New Shetlander magazine, an important local journal which emerged in 1947. The final chapter then looks at contemporary Shetland authors and asks how they negotiate the literary tradition the thesis has worked through. This chapter also discusses the Shetland-related work of several non-native authors, Jen Hadfield being the most well known. In moving through these authors, as well as providing necessary introductory material, several general questions are asked. Firstly, because almost all the writing studied emerges from the isles, the question of how each writer engages with those isles is consistently relevant. How do local writers find ways of writing about their native archipelago? Do writers who are not from Shetland write about the islands in different ways than local people? The thesis shows how Scott and MacDiarmid, the two most famous non-native authors dicussed here, draw on earlier literary sources – the sagas and the work of Doughty – to construct their respective creative visions of the isles. And, in discussing the work of local authors, it will be shown that, in the early period covered in Chapter One, landscape is the most prominent idea whereas, from the Victorian era to the present day, the croft provides the central imaginative space for Shetland’s writers. A second question that runs through the thesis is one of language. Almost every local author has written extensively in Shetland dialect, and this study explores how they have developed that language as a literary idiom. The thesis shows how Shetland dialect writing gets underway in the 1870s, and how writers have continued to expand and diversify that literary tradition. The two most innovative figures to emerge are J.J. Haldane Burgess and William J. Tait and, after demonstrating how the corpus of writing in Shetland dialect has grown, the thesis concludes by examining the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the vernacular legacies their predecessors have left. Extensive use of the local language gives Shetland’s writing a regional distinctiveness, and this thesis shows how some writers have been enabled and inspired by that idiom, how some have taken dialect writing in exciting new directions, but also how some have felt limited by it and how, by not using the language, some writers have been unfairly ignored by local editors and critics. The thesis also shows that, in its two main eras of development – at the end of the nineteenth century and in the middle of the twentieth – Shetland’s writers took their cues from the general movements in Scottish writing. In the Victorian period, developments in local letters paralleled the interest in regionality and upsurge in vernacular writing that are marked characteristics of Scottish writing at the time. And, in discussing the emergence of the New Shetlander and the writers associated with it, the thesis demonstrates how the second period of flourishing in Shetland’s literature is part of the wider cultural movement of the Scottish Renaissance. The picture of Shetland’s literature the thesis offers is a self-consciously heterogeneous one. Despite the marked use of the vernacular, the thesis resists moving towards an encompassing definition of the large body of work covered, preferring to celebrate the diversity of the writing that Shetland has inspired during the last two centuries. Questions of engagement with the local environment and the use of the local language are constantly asked, but the primary scholarly contribution offered by ‘The Literature of Shetland’ is a realignment of Scotland’s northern literary border.

C. Louis Leipoldt is known as a canonical figure in the history of Afrikaans poetry, He is customarily included in the pantheon of writers such as C.J. Langenhoven who not only established Afrikaans as a standardized national language in the early twentieth century, but also contributed to the idea of the Afrikaner Volk as a distinct nation within South Africa. The recent publication of Leipoldt's Valley Trilogy, three novels written in English in the 1930's now reveals Leipoldt in a very different light. Today, in a time of national transformation, Leipoldt's liberal ideas deserve to be given the broader scope he had intended for them.

This thesis examines the use of the pastoral form in recent Canadian literature. As the pastoral constitutes a literary site where a concern for landscape converges with a search for community, it has been employed as a myth in nationalist discourses whose functioning depend heavily on symbolized landscapes and idealized social types. The philosophical basis of the pastoral is the classical opposition between nature and culture. For this reason, its representations are often coded as 'natural'. To this extent, the pastoral participates in a hegemonic myth-making system, constituting a limited semiotic field in which certain representations are privileged while others are negated. Following Marx and Barthes, the thesis contends that an attack the nature/culture opposition is essential to undermining the hegemony of the myth-making process. In the context of nationalism, a pastoral can articulate a critique of dominant a 'naturalized' representations when it questions its own use of the nature/culture opposition.

Over the last seventy years, the discipline of English literature has been marked by an unnecessary and largely counterproductive tension between aesthetics and history. For many politically oriented critics, aesthetics was either uninteresting or implicated in the elite practices they deliberately opposed. And for those who focused on aesthetics, history frequently seemed like a distraction from what made the work of art a special kind of utterance, separate from other modes of language. This chapter revisits some of the signal literary engagements in the latter half of the long twentieth century, in order to consider what has been accomplished, what we have left out, and where we may be going next. With reference to writers from Donne and Herbert to John Milton, the chapter suggests, finally, that our analyses have too frequently ignored the decidedly impractical pleasure that emerges from literary activity, and argues that by bringing our own pleasure out of the closet, we can begin to restore to literary criticism some of the visceral thrill that drew us to it in the first place.