Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Chronology
- 1 Gordimer and South Africa: themes, issues and literary identity
- 2 The early novels: The Lying Days, A World of Strangers and Occasion for Loving
- 3 Developing narrative muscle: The Late Bourgeois World, A Guest of Honour and The Conservationist
- 4 The construction of identity: Burger's Daughter and July's People
- 5 Self-reflexive reassessments: A Sport of Nature and My Son's Story
- 6 The short stories
- 7 Conclusion. Gordimer: postmodernist?
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
3 - Developing narrative muscle: The Late Bourgeois World, A Guest of Honour and The Conservationist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Chronology
- 1 Gordimer and South Africa: themes, issues and literary identity
- 2 The early novels: The Lying Days, A World of Strangers and Occasion for Loving
- 3 Developing narrative muscle: The Late Bourgeois World, A Guest of Honour and The Conservationist
- 4 The construction of identity: Burger's Daughter and July's People
- 5 Self-reflexive reassessments: A Sport of Nature and My Son's Story
- 6 The short stories
- 7 Conclusion. Gordimer: postmodernist?
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Gordimer's next three longer works of fiction are all unique in their forms and scope, and demonstrate the range of the author's developing narrative skills. These works – The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1970) and The Conservationist (1974) – embody a range of techniques, produced, in part, by Gordimer's desire to react against and build upon previous work. There is also, however, a unifying principle in this group: each of these works is governed by a single, dominant intertextual presence which inspires both the issues treated in each novel, and the manner in which they are treated. These are by no means the only fictions in which quotation from, and allusion to, other texts occurs: the distinctive feature is that each of these novels stands in a transtextual relationship to a single, dominant textual source, and this principle of transtextuality determines a unique period of creativity.
THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD
In a 1979 interview Gordimer observed that The Late Bourgeois World ‘shows the breakdown of my belief in the liberal ideals’. Such a breakdown, as the preceding chapter suggests, was under way in the first three novels; but here it surfaces emphatically in the disruptive form of this arresting novella.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nadine Gordimer , pp. 77 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994