Publisher's Synopsis
Arthur Nortje, poet and South African: New critical and contextual essays is the first broad-ranging reassessment of Nortje's life and poetic career. This collection will be useful to a general readership and the Africanist scholar alike. The contributors to this title re-affiliate Nortje's work into the South African context. It is a reassessment of Nortje's career, biographically, poetically (in terms of theme and structural attributes), pedagogically and bibliographically, in light of the new corpus of work made available in Anatomy of dark. By involving established and emerging scholars an attempt is made to read Nortje's work and its reception through a melding of old and new. For the same reasons, the title intertwines the specific, concrete critical explications of single texts with the more abstract, theoretically oriented interpretations.Of the poetry Nortje himself saw through publication, the principal thematic concerns are with South Africa's race classification laws, with love, and with exile, as each impinges upon the poet's consciousness.The intent of this title is to offer a complimentary, multivoiced response to Nortje rather than a univocal and exclusive assessme.
