ABSTRACT This article reflects on some of the complexities of editing literary fiction in the multi-cultural and multi-lingual context of South Africa. It argues that the relationship between editor and author needs not only to respect and accommodate difference, but actively encourage and engage it. This, I suggest, requires the meticulous translation of ethical principles into concomitant practices. Broadly, my methodology is anecdotal – an approach I derive from Jane Gallop’s Anecdotal Theory (2002). I present eight anecdotes regarding my editorial experience and use them to refract several institutional and political concerns relevant to authors, editors and the South African publishing industry.

ABSTRACT This article explores possibilities of narrative and textual Umwelten or relational systems in The Waves in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology. It reads the text as concerned with various forms of intercorporeality: that is, the shared tangibility and relationality between bodies, parts of one flesh or times and places, and the intervals or gaps between these. It traces a variety of narrative and textual kinships in The Waves, exploring the congruencies and divergences between the two thinkers in relation to their approaches to life as an interconnected weave of the human and nonhuman. Ultimately, it suggests that situating Woolf’s practice as intercorporeal allows one to think differently about the potential of literary language to foster dynamic meaning-making environments that avoid hierarchization or anthropocentrism.

ABSTRACT Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These (2021), is, formally speaking, something of a hybrid text. Its thematic burden is so lucidly discharged that the narrative has the quality of an elaborate fable or parable. The theme – the challenge to a man’s conscience posed by his discovery of institutionally sanctioned evil in the small Irish town where he lives – is nevertheless conveyed in a scrupulously realist narrative mode. This essay traces the logical unfolding of the theme by examining the motions of the mind and heart of the protagonist Bill Furlong, arguing that the tale lends itself to an Existentialist reading.

ABSTRACT Mohale Mashigo’s story ‘Little Vultures’ from her collection Intruders (2018) challenges readers to examine how judgments about genetic technologies are imbricated with understandings and experiences of kinship. Centred on the lives of three women – two genetic scientists and one famous musician – the story explores how creative practices expose social mechanisms that police kinship. It also considers how the women’s defences of their creations remain tied to concepts of individual ownership that limit understanding of kinship and distort relationships with aging and death. Interlacing a variety of historical and contemporary discourses and practices that construct kinship in South Africa, the story demonstrates the need to consider bioethical decisions in relation to the social reproduction and contestation of norms of family and responsibility; considered in relation to other stories in the collection, ‘Little Vultures’ reframes bioethical debates to show these questions do not belong to (Western) science alone.

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy employs anthropomorphism throughout his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (2006). This article examines the depiction of an anthropomorphic Earth in this novel and the effects of personifying the post-apocalyptic world as a mournable body. It argues that the anthropomorphism in this novel is ecocentric and planetary, which is a useful rhetorical tactic to mourn the dead Earth, engender empathy in readers for the humanized planet and promote environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviour. It also posits that the novel laments the loss of non-human nature as well as human beings by paralleling the failure of parental care with that of care for the planet. The anthropomorphism of Earth allows the novel to be read as a proleptic ecological elegy. Interrogating the anthropomorphism of Earth in this novel is pivotal to understanding its profound environmental ramifications and McCarthy’s planetary concern.

ABSTRACT In this paper I explore how intersexuality, a subject rarely addressed in Anglophone Nigerian literature, is treated in Buki Papillon’s An Ordinary Wonder (2021). I examine the societal stigma surrounding intersex bodies, their underrepresentation in media, and intersex activists’ advocacy for bodily autonomy and self-definition. The analysis studies how Papillon navigates precolonial and postcolonial perspectives on gender and sex, focusing on Lori, the protagonist and narrator, and her struggle to be perceived as a woman. It further investigates whether Lori seeks to disrupt the gender binary or find a livable alternative. The study also considers the role of the Yorùbá goddess Yemayá in the novel and how traditional beliefs might be a source of solace in opposition to the rigidity of colonial gender norms, which tend to situate diverse bodies in critical situations. Thus, I evaluate the intersection of culture and gender identity while addressing themes of monstrosity, violence and restrictive gender stereotypes. These discussions critically engage with the novel’s treatment of complex issues, contributing to the broader discourse on intersex representation in literature.

ABSTRACT This article argues for the importance of recognizing the various histories reflected in performances of Shakespeare, and for the critical work this requires. South African productions have often illustrated the bedevilments of Shakespeare as a product within a neo-colonial cultural economy. However, despite the prominence of productions staged locally and abroad in collaboration with British theatre institutions, they should not be understood as representative. I suggest that a more expansive account of local productions is needed, using a virtual production of Hamlet (2021), adapted and directed by Neil Coppen and staged for the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK), as a starting point. Within a broader history of Shakespeare on post-apartheid stages, Hamlet (2021) is one of several local productions that have, formally and thematically, undermined the symbolic, spectacular and general in favour of the personal, ordinary and specific. To illustrate, I provide a list of productions staged between 1994 and 2021 along with analyses of productions of King Lear (2002) and Julius Caesar (1994, 2001–2002). My discussion demonstrates that the generative complexities of Hamlet are not new, but resonate with existing, overlooked legacies of local performance. To further develop the perspectives afforded by such legacies, I argue that scholarship must pursue more detailed theatre histories that engage with and expand existing archives.

ABSTRACT Girls in South African young adult (YA) fiction typically represent a heteropatriarchal, sexually passive model of femininity that allows for neither sexual autonomy nor sexual desire. This article examines six prominent South African YA novels that are unusual in that the sexual desires of their teenage heroines play an important role in shaping plot or character: S. A. Partridge’s Dark Poppy’s Demise (2011); Adeline Radloff’s Sidekick (2010); Sonwabiso Ngcowa’s In Search of Happiness (2014); and Lily Herne’s Mall Rats series of three books. The study finds that even in these rare examples of South African texts that treat girls’ desires as significant, desire mostly remains ambivalent or is treated evasively, while violence, by contrast, is embedded in each novel’s social context and routinely described at length, in explicit detail. South African girls live in a violent world, but the article argues that reducing their lives to a single violent dimension only perpetuates that violence. And in correlating girls’ desire indissociably with violence, these texts normalize the violent punishment of girls whose femininity is not sexually passive.

ABSTRACT Wagner’s early opera The Flying Dutchman has long been recognized as the first of the composer’s works to be written in his own authentic style and idiom, in which the protagonist strongly suggests a metaphorical representation of autobiographical content, complemented by a musical expression of overpowering will that listeners have variously felt to be aggressively domineering or curiously liberating. This paper traces the progressive unfolding of these effects in the course of seeing (and hearing) the work performed, approaching it as a form of drama in which stage action and dialogue are immeasurably enhanced by the Wagnerian musical narrative. As such, it begins with the overture, in which the opera’s central metaphor is already implicit in the figure of the storm, before becoming explicit in the onstage presentation of character contrasts and relationships, a dynamic in which the sympathetic listener is increasingly implicated through a heightened emotional (and even quasi-sexual) involvement in the music. There is, in other words, an implied parallel between the heroine’s redemption of the doomed Dutchman and the aesthetic abandonment to the work itself that is so imperiously demanded of its audience.

ABSTRACT In the face of global warming, human over-population, the catastrophic consequences of being who and what we are, of what our languages have defined us to be, we need to rediscover nature’s own voice. Far from imposing a human ‘voice’ or language upon nature, we must find a way to echo, reflect and respect the many natural voices that already exist everywhere. Ironically, to get this vital message across we are obliged to use the vocabularies, syntaxes and linguistic expressions already taken for granted in a predominantly corporate, capitalist global society. But we can rearrange and adapt these into poetry. This article reflects on how the growing academic field of ecopoetics lends itself to establishing a new ‘default discourse,’ questioning the current orthodoxy to ask: how does the poetry of Dan Wylie offer an alternative construction of the world to dominant discourses? Using a selection from Wylie’s several published collections, the article shows how the work of this major South African poet employs such an ecopoetic language. The selected poems demonstrate a profound commitment to the importance of the natural environment and of ecopoetry as the best way to give it expression. Ultimately, and despite the bleak prospects currently facing Earth in the form of accelerating climate change, this article finds reasons for optimism, but it requires our adapting to changing realities. The first essential step towards such adaptation is to accept the pressing need for a revised default discourse expressed through ecopoetry.