The Worlding of the South African Novel

‘Via an analysis of intellectual spaces in the “new” South Africa, The Worlding of the South African Novel offers compelling and timely readings of a variety of works spanning 1994 to 2014 depicting the socioeconomic contradictions of the post-apartheid nation. Poyner’s work explores how, via their fiction, contemporary novelists have challenged South Africa’s apparent liberation in 1994 and grappled provocatively with its current struggles.’

— Laura Wright, Professor of English, Western Carolina University, USA

‘Poyner’s study is essential reading for anyone interested in post-apartheid literary culture. Highlighting the contradictions between the political freedoms accompanying the formal end of apartheid and the ongoing economic inequalities produced by South Africa’s version of capitalist modernity, Poyner demonstrates how in both content and form the novels of the last thirty years have captured the social realities of the ‘rainbow nation’.’

—David Johnson, Professor of Literature, The Open University, UK

The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from an apparent paradox: that despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”. The mediatising of truth at the TRC, how best to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping of an inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature to register the “shock” of an uneven capitalist modernity.