![]() ![]() The overall approach adopted may be described as broadly, but critically, postmodernist. To lend a sense of historical context, Paton’s work is viewed against the backdrop of identity in colonial Natal. In order to contextualise the study in Africa and in South Africa, brief attention is accorded to writers such as Soyinka, Mbiti and Mbembe and to current debates regarding white identity in South Africa. The writer advances reasons for his explicitly religious and hermeneutic approach to questions of human identity, as found in Paton especially, and focuses these on two particular areas: narrative identity, as propounded in the later work of Paul Ricoeur, and relational identity (to the other human being and to the Other, God), as theorised by Emmanuel Levinas in his later writing. It is pointed out that research into the interrelationship of literature and religion, while well-established in a number of countries, is lagging in South Africa, and it is believed that the present thesis is the first full-length work of its kind, at least as far as South African literature in English is concerned. ABSTRACT The thesis represents an attempt, within the broad field of religion and literature and of identity studies, to read the early unpublished fiction of Alan Paton, dating from approximately 1922 (the end of his student days) to 1935 (when he became Principal of Diepkloof Reformatory). ![]()
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