My first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, was published with Bloomsbury. A Russian edition is also forthcoming with Academic Studies Press. It is centrally concerned with how Russia’s nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of literature and ideas provides a model for the study of South African realist forms and epistemologies both during and after apartheid. It also advances a broader argument for perceived disconnection as a basis for far-flung transnational affinities. Through paired readings of nineteenth-century Russian texts and their South African successors, the book asks how traditions marked by a formative sense of isolation in the world make us ask harder questions about the “global” as a method and analytic category.

South African Literature’s Russian Soul is available through its Bloomsbury website title page and on Amazon.com.

The book’s Introduction is posted on my academia.edu page with Bloomsbury’s permission, and citation details are available through the links above.

SELECTED REVIEWS:

Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s book examines the striking series of elective affinities between South African writers and their Russian precursors, from Tolstoy to Nabokov. Anyone with an interest in South African literature will want to read this book, not only for the questions of influence it deals with, but for the way it explores the manifold connections between the local and the global. (Patrick Hayes, Teaching Fellow in English Literature, St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK)

Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s work breaks genuinely new ground in the study of the postcolonial novel-by reading the novels of apartheid-era South Africa not in relationship to Anglo-American literature, but by considering their relationship to the Russian realist novels of the nineteenth century. …[It] is often dazzling in its analytic precision, its heft, its depth of analysis. (Katie Trumpener, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University, USA)

In South African Literature’s Russian Soul, Jeanne-Marie Jackson has written what is in many ways the most original and yet the most traditional study of this country’s intellectual culture–original because it inspects and reworks the existing frameworks by which we understand the national and international dimensions of the written word, traditional because it does its conceptual work with the old-fashioned virtues of capacious historical learning and microscopic engagement with the details of language and imagination. It is the one book I’ll recommend to writers as well as readers who are orienting themselves to this part of the world. (Imraan Coovadia, novelist and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, South Africa)