Drummer Hodge : the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)

From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it

Frontier Transculturation and Transgression in the Early Eastern Cape

The multicultural dynamics of the Eastern Cape frontier, and the story of the major actors in its drama of transculturation, conflict, and transgression, are foundational in South African history. It was here, after all, as Clifton Crais and Tim Keegan have reminded us, that the South African colonial and racial order came into being, and it was here, too, that major resistance to that order would in due course emerge.1 In this paper, however, my focus will not be on the captains and kings, governors and chiefs, rulers and radicals who at various times decided the fate of the Eastern Cape, be they Xhosa or settlers, Boers or Bushmen, white or black. Rather, I am intrigued by the many shadowy characters in the margin of the story - liminal, unaffiliated, intermediary figures who move in and out of the shadows of the narrative. They are often enigmatic persons of unknown origin and barely known identity, but who equally often suggest that their role in frontier history could have been - and sometimes was - an important one .

“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair”: The drama and architecture of Shakespeare’s sonnets

This essay was delivered as the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in 2017. It argues that Shakespeare’s predisposition to recognise and develop the dramatic moment turned his initial interest in the normally static and contemplative sonnet into the components of something more like an oratorio of dramatic variations in sonnet form. The author focuses on four sonnets (18, 30, 116, 129) that stake out the thematic and structural range of the whole sequence, and discusses how the poet explores the compositional and indeed architectonic possibilities inherent in the principles and procedures of pursuing ‘variations on a theme’. The sonnets can thus be understood as an ambitious proto-baroque diptych, the two halves of which were to present an elaborate allegory of love versus lust, trust versus deceit, and innocence versus experience

What literature? : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes UniversityRhodes University Libraries (Digitisation