The liberal tradition in fiction

Abstract

To speak of any ‘tradition’, let alone a ‘liberal’ tradition, in South African English fiction requires caution. In 1979 Stephen Gray considered that ‘tradition-making, in English South Africa, has often occurred fortuitously, rather than by any planned consciousness through which the writer has fused his or her own literature's past with contemporary stimuli’ ( Southern African Literature , p. 7), and in 1994 Stephen Clingman concluded that there is ‘no aim or sense of building a novelistic tradition’, only ‘patterns of thematic accumulation’ (“Novel’, p. 1148). If the critical consensus has resisted the notion of a tradition, it has nevertheless ascribed a certain shape to the literary history of liberal fiction. Richard Rive, himself a liberal author, is one of many who consider Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) a ‘watershed’, soon after which ‘liberal writing was on the wane’ (‘Liberal Tradition’, pp. 31, 21). Paul Rich argues that between Beloved Country and Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World (1966) a ‘crisis at the heart of post-war South African liberalism’ gave rise to ‘a progressive loss of literary self-confidence’ that ‘produced an internal crisis of literary form’ ( Hope and Despair , pp. 119–20; see also Rich, ‘Liberal Realism’), while Michael Vaughan describes the overturning of liberal hegemony in the 1970s by modernism and popular realism, represented respectively by J. M. Coetzee and Mtutuzeli Matshoba (“Literature and Politics’).

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