This edited collection investigates the kinds of philosophical reflection we can undertake in the imaginative worlds of literature. Opening with a look into the relations between philosophical thought and literary interpretation, the volume proceeds through absorbing discussions of the ways we can see life through the lens of literature, the relations between philosophical saying and literary showing, and some ways we can see the literary past philosophically and assess its significance for the present. Taken as a whole, the volume shows how imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight and understanding. And because philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, a heightened sensitivity to the precise employments of our words – particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, selfhood, illusion, understanding, falsehood – can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words – metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can thus enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. With a combination of conceptual acuity and literary sensitivity, this volume maps out some of the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.

The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator? Jolly looks at three primary South African authors -- André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee -- to consider violence in the context of apartheid and colonialism and their inherent patriarchies. Jolly also discusses the violence attendant upon the act of narration in the broader context of critiques of Kafka, Freud, Hegel, the postcolonial critics Jan Mohamed and Bhabha, and feminists such as Susan Suleiman.

This compilation brings together twenty essays on the work of one of South Africa's most distinguished, prolific and internationally best recognized writers. The essays look at Brink's approach to the genre and its narrative techniques.

David Attwell defends the literary and political integrity of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee by arguing that Coetzee has absorbed the textual turn of postmodern culture while still addressing the ethical tensions of the South African crisis. As a form of "situational metafiction," Coetzee's writing reconstructs and critiques some of the key discourses in the history of colonialism and apartheid from the eighteenth century to the present. While self-conscious about fiction-making, it takes seriously the condition of the society in which it is produced. Attwell begins by describing the intellectual and political contexts surrounding Coetzee's fiction and then provides a developmental analysis of his six novels, drawing on Coetzee's other writings in stylistics, literary criticism, translation, political journalism and popular culture. Elegantly written, Attwell's analysis deals with both Coetzee's subversion of the dominant culture around him and his ability to see the complexities of giving voice to the anguish of South Africa.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Nadine Gordimer is generally viewed as a liberal champion of justice against the evils of apartheid South Africa. This provocative rereading of her works sees a more ambivalent and culturebound Gordimer. Wagner examines Gordimer's construction of female identity, her images of blacks, and her landscape iconography, and finds her very much a product of white colonial perspective. Also examined are the tensions between liberal humanism and radical politics in the novels and her status as a feminist writer. The conclusion reviews the links between romanticism, generalisations, and stereotypes in her work, in the context of a discussion of her latest novel, My Son's Story.

"Nadine Gordimer and the Rhetoric of Otherness in Post-Apartheid South Africa observes and examines several issues that are central to the South African writer's works: the uniqueness of terror in a difficult historical period, the desire to annihilate racial oppression, and, above all, the psychological alienation provoked by racism. The analysis also focuses on literary topics that are specific to Gordimer's post-Apartheid writings, such as the significance of multiculturalism, the status of writers, the banalisation of violence due to mass-media coverage, the reconciliation with a violent past, globalization and loss of cultural and national identity, economic exile, and migration. The book proposes in five chapters a journey into Nadine Gordimer's novels, short stories and non-fiction that presents the reader with a multifaceted Other who is no longer specific to postcolonial and multicultural South Africa but can be identified across the globe as alterity is redefined by globalization."