WORLD OF LETTERS, reading communities and cultural debates in early apartheid South Africa

309 pp., paperback, Pietermaritzburg, 2014

A history of forgotten or overlooked South African literary-cultural communities and the distinctive practices of literary-cultural consumption, analysis and appreciation with which they were associated. Corinne Sandwich pursues this history in oppositional newspapers, literary magazines, debating societies and theatre groups of the 1940s and 1950s, to demonstrate that "literary criticism and cultural debate were not solely the enterprise of academics, but also part of popular discourses forged outside the academy in contexts of engagement and resistance." pg.4 of the introduction

"This project is long overdue. This is the first in-depth analysis of the entire corpus of liberal and left-wing literary-cultural writings in this period." Archie Dick, Professor of Information Science, University of Pretoria

Corinne Sandwich is currently in Associate Professor of English at the University of Pretoria.