World of letters
Subtitle: reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa
By: Corinne Sandwith
Publisher: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
ISBN-13: 9781869142629
Subjects: Journalism; Intellectuals; Biography; Books and reading; Resistance to Government; Marxist criticism; Intellectual life; Apartheid; Non-European Unity Movement (South Africa)
Description: "World of Letters retrieves an important but largely forgotten history of readers, reading practices and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa. Corinne Sandwith pursues this history in the ephemeral spaces of oppositional newspapers, literary magazines, debating societies and theatre groups. What emerges from the diverse fragments is a rich tradition of public debate in South Africa on literature and culture. What also surfaces are a host of readers and critics - such as A.C. Jordan,  Dora Taylor, Jack Cope and Ben Kies  -  whose lively cultural interventions form a significant part of South Africa' s literary-cultural and socio-political heritage. Offering a combination of historical narrative,  critical analysis and biography,  this elegantly written book recovers these neglected reading and debating communities in order to bring them into the present and to reclaim their constitutive role in both the literary archive and the public sphere." -- Back page.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: A faithless literature of frustration and protest; title: Politics aside: The South African Opinion; title: The moment of Trek; title: Dora Taylor - marxist literary critic; title: Civility in question: cultural debates in the Non-European Unity Movement; title: Yours for socialism: communist cultural criticism, radical theatre and Jack Cope; title: 'From urban gentlemen with clean hands to a militant people's movement' : literary-cultural debates post-1948.