Journal of Literary Studies.

Published 4 times a year.

2018 was vol 34

2019 is vol 35

As a whole, the journal is about different literary studies. Lots of literary theory like Marxist, feminist,
and structuralist theory.

Seems to have an emphasis on south African media, but it is not exclusively about that.

As might be expected, the authors seem to have various backgrounds, and they are not only published
in literary jorunals.

Vol 34 issue 1

First several articles are about South African literature. Aesthetics of Genocide literature. One article
was even in the language Afrikaans.

Looking at the website I realize that the website was published by the south African department of
higher education and learning. Afrikaans is an accepted language for some of the literature.

Ecocriticism. Gender studies .

Issue 2:

Genocide is a big component of what is discussed. Aesthetics of genocide, genocide through queer
lenses etc. Igbo genocide is how its characterized.

Extinction of nature. Lots of ecocriticism again. Yeats is mentioned as an example of non African stuff.

The savanah

Impacts of colonialism.

Appropriating Herman Charles Bosman: Same-Sex Desire and the Unmaking of Otherness.

Issue 3:

(Dis)Continuities in Bond: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the 007 Films.

van der Merwe, Philip
Particularly interesting
Special issue ; “Things Fall Apart”: Introduction to the Special Issue on the Theme of the 2017
SASGLS/SAVAL General Conference
There was a conference that “On 17 and 18 August 2017, the South African Society for General Literary
Studies/Suid-Afrikaanse Vereniging vir Algemene Literatuurwetenskap (SASGLS/SAVAL) hosted its
biennial conference on the Sunnyside Campus of the University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria. The
theme of the conference, which followed on SASGLS/SAVAL’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” colloquium
hosted in 2016, was taken from W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming” (1919), famously
used by Chinua Achebe as the title of his influential postcolonial novel. The line from Yeats’s poem
suggests crisis, both as a key term in traditional poetics and as a much broader theme, in the sense of
flux – or even disintegration and collapse. It problematises the idea of literary representations of chaos
or the collapse of order. However, it also presents opportunities for renewal or the imagining of possible
worlds, as the collapse of old structures makes way for a new order. The theme is not intended to focus
only on political imagination or critique, whether pessimistic or optimistic, utopian or dystopian, but can
also be applied to literature on an individual, psychological level or on an abstract, theoretical one. Thus,
the theme invokes not just postcolonialism and decoloniality, but also poststructuralism and
deconstruction, and many other fields of research besides. In total, 39 papers were presented at the
conference by scholars from South Africa, Canada, Turkey, and the United States, which meant that it
had been the largest biennial conference of SASGLS/SAVAL hosted in the last decade.”

Issue 4:

Once again environmentalism plays a large role. We get some more western works as there is a piece on
Frankenstein by Bert Olivier that compares dr. Frankenstein to modern day humanity as both of us
refuse to take responsibility for our creations and the suffering that are born from these creations.
Envirmental stuff etc.

This issue in particular has time as a major literary theme with articles with titles like : Writing in and
about Prison, Childhood Albinism and Human Temporality in The Book of Memory. By Isaac Ndlovu

Remembering the Future: The Temporal Relationship between Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Jean
Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

By Stephanie De Villiers

Understanding Sexual Violence through its Timing in Kagiso Lesego Molope's This Book Betrays my
Brother.

By Naoimi Nikealah

Gender and Time in Ahmed Yerima's Aetu.

By Albert Oloruntoba

Almost whole issue is TIME BASED.

VOL 35:

Issue 1:

Issue is focused on the works of Koos Prinsloo “. Probably best known for his transgressive homosexual
and anti-nationalist leitmotifs, it is not difficult to see why he has had a longlasting impact on especially
the Afrikaans literary scene” He is an author of a lot of famous African literature, but it seems his works
have only been published in Afrikaans

Labor and class comes up. Fiction, Reality and Contested Memory in God's Bits of Wood and the
"Marikana Commission Report". Has both an English and Afrikaans Translation. By Lucas Mafu

Issue deals with capitalism and labor significantly, and starting with this issue every article has an
Afrikaans and English abstract. Queer and masculinity are also dealt with a lot here.

Issue 2:

Historicism and geography come up a lot here