Reviews of The Cambridge History of South African Literature and The Cambridge History of South Africa
Verdict: carrot
The Cambridge History of South African Literature is one of those books that is so substantial it stands up by itself. This is true in the physical sense (it is 877 pages long) as well as, conceptually at least, in terms of its content: it has such breadth and depth that it stands comfortably beside all those other magisterial overviews of world literatures from Cambridge. It almost feels like a country doesn’t have a national literature until Cambridge has summed it all up and put it between covers.
Verdict: carrot
The late master Eric HobsÂbawm, in his biography Interesting Times, recalled his time as a young radical in the English fens in the 1930s and described what he called Cambridge University’s peculiar “principal of unripe time”: whatever somebody may propose and however good the proposal, the time is inevitably not yet ripe. Thus it is that the last time Cambridge University Press produced a general volume on South African history, pneumonic plague took the lives of 350 South Africans.
Book Details
- The Cambridge History of South African Literature edited by David Attwell and Derek Attridge
EAN: 9780521199285
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- The Cambridge History of South Africa edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K Mbenga, Robert Ross
EAN: 9781107678224
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Apr
