Kenneth Parker

Brief Chronicles Kenneth Parker

'... let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time'. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.ii) This is a finely-woven set of essays on South African literatures addressing a kaleidoscopic range of disciples spanning literature, history, cultural criticism and journalism. '...some of the most relevant and re-visionary literary criticism of South African writing I have encountered... The author's intimate knowledge of the socio-historical and political contexts in which the texts under review came into being transcends that of documented history. His personal involvement in precisely that socio-historical moment as a so-called black South African and de facto thus a member of the 'disadvantaged' community, which so many of the authors (whether black or white) under review were at pains to represent, and later as an intellectual in exile, makes him singular well positioned to interrogate and to reinterpret earlier criticism of several texts. His project is to explore the critical ideological assumptions embedded not only in a large number of South African novels but also in the criticism thereof.' - Prof Rosemary Gray 'Writing about the country of my birth not only from places far distant from places for distant from it and to which at those times I was convinced I was would never be allowed to return, perhaps affected the matter as profoundly as did the new ways of seeing critical and cultural theories, ' says the author. The collection covers five key themes, each of which engages with the theme of global interest in and eradication of not only the political but also the cultural distortions of the apartheid regim