South African literature resources
Websites
- Africa south of the Sahara
- A good starting point maintained by Stanford University Libraries. There are useful pages such as African Literature and Writers on the Internet and South Africa: Literature that are well worth exploring.
The inbuilt search engine makes it easy to find a specific piece of information.
- South African literature
- An excellent introduction to the topic. On the same site you'll find a page headed 25 classic South African reads which is a handy reference list.
There are many other useful pages on this site.
- Electronic Journal of Africana Bibliography (EJAB)
- A refereed online journal of bibliographies on any aspect of Africa, its peoples, their homes, cities, towns, districts, states, countries, regions, including social, economic,sustainable development, creative literature, the arts, and the Diaspora.
- NELM: National English Literary Museum
- The mission of the National English Literary Museum is to promote the reading and appreciation of all forms of imaginative South African literature in English.
Its principal functions are to collect and conserve material evidence pertaining to this literature, to publicise and popularise it, and to provide all sections of the reading public, both locally and abroad, with the means of access to it.
Database searches can be done on individual authors. Anyone who requires information in connection with Southern African English literature can call upon the Research Department in person or via letter, telephone, fax or e-mail.
Reference works
- South African writers
- I recommend this very useful work in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Edited by Paul Scanlon, it has 460 pages covering all the major writers (André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadime Gordimer, for example) with illustrations and good bibliographies.
An excellent starting point for researching aspects of South African writing.
You'll find it in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection at call number 920 D548 volume 225.
To find critical works on South African literature in the Barr Smith Library, search the Library Catalogue under the Subject Headings South African literature (English)--History and criticism and South African literature (English)--20th century--History and criticism and the subheadings under both these Subject Headings.
Finding South African literature in the Barr Smith Library
To shelve South African literature books and journals in the Library's collections we use the same Dewey classification numbers as the ones for English literature, 820-829, but to distinguish them we add an upper case letter S. [Following the same principle, we classify Australian literature at 820A - the Dewey number for English literature followed by the letter A].
We shelve these books immediately following the plain 820 to 829 numbers.
Here's an example: the Catalogue record for the book Essays on South African writing, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, gives its Location as in the Main collection at Call number 820.9S G981e.
Here's how you find books and journals with 820...S classification:
- start by locating the English literature sequence, 823-829, on Barr Smith Library Level 1 South
[If you're not sure where to find those numbers, here's a map]
- go along the shelves until you come to books with Call Numbers starting with 829
- the very next books you see will have Call Numbers starting with 820A, which is the beginning of the Australian literature sequence
- keep going until you find 820P [Pacific Islands literature] and continue along the sequence
- next you'll strike gold!-- before your startled gaze will be the 820S books and journals
- simply follow the sequence from 820S until you arrive at 820.9S G981e
- warning! if you get to 830 [German literature] you've gone too far; backtrack a little...
This page is maintained by Jennifer Osborn
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