Dystopian Ecologies

Thinking about South African Ecocriticism through a Comparative Reading of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion and Alettie van den Heever’s Stof [ Dust ]

Bibliographic Data

ID20156191
AuthorsLouise Viljoen (0000-0002-1748-9098, Stellenbosch University, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume37
Issue1
Pages20-35
Publication date2021-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
PublisherUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564718.2021.1887650
OpenAlexW3137088829
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

This article explores the notion of a South African ecocriticism by firstly placing it against the background of the ongoing debates about the relationship between postcolonialism and ecocriticism and secondly by situating it within the context of African ecocriticism. It points out the most important characteristics of South African ecocriticism, focusing on the impact of South Africa’s colonial history on environmental matters, the subsequent entanglement of environmental with social matters as well as the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. The “dynamism and contingency” (Wylie 2006: 266) typical of South African ecocriticism is further considered by a comparative reading of two recent South African novels that present dystopian views of a future environment, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s English novel Green Lion (2015), which deals with animal extinction, and Alettie van den Heever’s Afrikaans novel Stof [Dust] (2018), which focuses on plant extinction

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Contingency · Dystopia · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Linguistics · Literature · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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