The Politics and New Humanism of André Brink

This book appraises André Brinks reputation as an internationally acclaimed commentator on the enormities of the apartheid state and one of South Africas foremost novelists. Highlighting Brinks enduring meditation on the writers responsibility to a society in a state of moral and political siege and his exemplary position in the interrogation of the subtle discursive strategies of the apartheid establishment, it refers extensively to Brinks oeuvre, but focuses mainly on his first seven novels in English: The Ambassadors, Looking on Darkness, An Instant in the Wind, Rumours of Rain, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices and The Wall of the Plague. Aimed primarily at students of South Africa, it draws on postcolonial theory to examine the ideological implications of the Western aesthetic and intellectual background that nurtured Brinks imagination, his fixation with the tragic vision, Christian theology, and existentialism, in the context of his professed political affiliations.