The South African Short Story in English, 1920–2010: When Aesthetics Meets Ethics, by Marta Fossati
Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 289. ISBN: 9780198910978
This book explores – through a close reading and several deep dives into the history of print culture – the development of the South African short story in English, from the late 1920s to the first decade of the new millennium. It explores a selection of short stories by Black South African writers – Rolfes and Herbert Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Ahmed Essop and Zoë Wicomb – with particular focus on the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics performed by these texts with regard to the evolution of South Africa’s socio-political situation.
By focusing on Black short fiction, this book problematizes and complicates the often-polarized readings of Black literature in South Africa, torn between the notions of literariness, protest and journalism. Owing to material constraints, short fiction in South Africa primarily circulated first through local print media, which this study analyses in detail, with a focus on the cross-fertilization between journalism and the short story. While rooted in the South African context, this book is also alert to the translocal dimension of the short stories considered, exploring the ethical and aesthetical practice of intertextuality. It is thus also a book that complicates the aesthetics/ethics binary, generic classifications, and the categories of the literary and the political.