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    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"
    Ebook45 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535826723
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "July's People" - Gale

      3

      July's People

      Nadine Gordimer

      1981

      Introduction

      In light of the uprisings of the 1970s, Nadine Gordimer presented a very bleak and cynical prophecy to white and black South Africa. That prophecy suggested no solution to problematic race relations but foresaw an inevitable overthrow of the apartheid system of the Afrikaner Nationalists. With the declaration of independence by the neighboring nations of Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, the demise of white rule in South Africa was anticipated.

      July's People takes place during a future revolution in South Africa. Amid such chaos, traditional roles are overturned and new ones must be forged. In that sense, the novel exists in Antonio Gramsci's (the source of the novel's epigraph) interregnum—between the explosion of the old but before the birth of the new.

      July's People captures the mood of a South Africa expecting revolutionary violence just like that experienced by neighboring countries. Instead of writing about a revolution, however, the novel assumes such an event will happen and imagines what affect it might have on a liberal white family. In this case, the family decides to accept their servant's offer of refuge and flee to his village. There, with all the awkwardness of Friday nursing Robinson Crusoe, they hope to wait out the war. Gradually, all the family's accoutrements of civilization are given up, stolen, or proven to be completely useless. Simultaneously, the power relations of society are revealed as hollow. However, there is hope in that self-awareness and in the children's immersion in village life as a possible route to the construction of a new South Africa.

      Author Biography

      Gordimer was born in Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg in the Transvaal region of South Africa, in 1923. Springs served as the setting of her first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Her father was a jeweler from Latvia and her mother was of British descent. Growing up, Gordimer was often sequestered indoors because her mother feared she had a weak heart. She spent some time in convent school where, she admits in an autobiographical essay A Bolter and the Invincible Summer (1963), she was a habitual truant.

      In response to her confinement, Gordimer began writing at the age of nine. Her first published story was The Quest for Seen Gold, which appeared in June of 1937 in the Johannesburg Sunday Express. Fortunately, she maintains, the publication of her work did not lead to the smothering that one sees with those considered gifted. Instead she was left to her own devices and, thus, began a long career of writing about life in South Africa.

      Her short stories were continually published in magazines until her first book came out in 1952. It was a collection of short stories titled The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952). Already, her technique was evident. Her writing had clarity, little emotion, and great

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