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The Persistent Presence of the Past in Contemporary Writing in South Africa


D Bell

Abstract

In the mid-1990s André P Brink argued that history provides one of the more fertile ‘silences’ to be revisited by South African writers. With Brink’s postmodernist perception of history as a point of departure, the article explores ways in which contemporary South African fiction has attempted to mediate and problematise the past. The focus is recent works by Breytenbach, Coetzee, Wicomb and Mda as illustrative of the interaction of the past and the present.

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eISSN: 2159-9130
print ISSN: 1013-929X