Dennis Walder

The Open University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Emeritus

Followers

Following

Public Views

After over twenty years as full time academic, Head of Department, full Professor and research group leader, now retired Emeritus Professor of Literature. Published many articles and books on 19thc Fiction (especially Dickens), South African Theatre (especially Athol Fugard) and Postcolonial Literature & Theory, more recently Postcolonial Nostalgias (2012 book). Now working on memory and life writing, publishing short stories, co-edit Journal of Southern African Studies. External examining and literary panels.

less

Andrej Dujella

University of Zagreb

Hemin Koyi

Uppsala University

Jana Javornik

University of East London

Graham Martin

University of Leicester

Gwen Robbins Schug

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Gabriel Gutierrez-Alonso

University of Salamanca

John Sutton

Macquarie University

Eros Carvalho

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Kevin Arbuckle

Swansea University

Jesper Hoffmeyer

University of Copenhagen

Uploads

Papers by Dennis Walder

‘The Broken String’: Remembering the Homeland

‘Alone in a Landscape’: Remembering Doris Lessing’s Africa

Little Dorrit

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 12, 2012

<p>'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from th... more <p>'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.' Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made social and mental prisons. Against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal, he searches for the key to the affairs of the Dorrit family, prisoners for debt in the Marshalsea. He discovers through the seamstress Amy Dorrit the fulfilment of which he dreams, but only after he learns to understand his own heart. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens's portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. Mixing humour and pathos, irony and satire, Dickens's eleventh novel reveals a master of fiction in top form. This new edition, based on the definitive Clarendon text, includes all of Phiz's original illustrations and a wide-ranging introduction highlighting Dickens's move to more personal and spiritual concerns.</p>

The sins of the fathers--and the mothers

Times literary supplement, TLS, 1997

Introduction yo literature

The Open University Press eBooks, 1978

Still Beating the Drum: critical perspectives on Lewis Nkosi (review)

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2007

Download

The Realist Novel

Routledge eBooks, Aug 18, 2005

Postcolonial Nostalgias

Preface and Acknowledgments 1: Introductory: The Persistence of Nostalgia 2: 'How is it going... more Preface and Acknowledgments 1: Introductory: The Persistence of Nostalgia 2: 'How is it going Mr Naipaul?': Remembering Postcolonial Identites 3: 'The Broken String': Remembering the Homeland 4: 'Alone in a Landscape': Remembering Doris Lessing's Africa 5: Recalling the Hidden Ends of Empire: W.G. Sebald 6: Remembering 'bitter histories': From Achebe to Adichie 7: Nostalgia for the Present: J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun Endnote Notes Bibliography Index

Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory

Sticker on a bike

Times Literary Supplement Tls, 1997

Italicized encounters

Scrutiny2, 1999

Sticker on a bike

Times literary supplement, TLS, 1997

J. M. Coetzee

Modern Language Review, Apr 1, 2000

Post-colonial literature in English [A421] Offprints Collection

Religious aspects of Charles Dickens's novels

There is no first reading": (re)-reading nineteenth-century realist novels and their critics

�My English name is patience�: Mediating the voice of the other in South African theatre today

Contemporary Theatre Review, 1999

Download

Athol Fugard

Remembering trauma : Fugard's The Train Driver

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 10137548 2014 876797, Jan 28, 2014

Among Fugard's post-apartheid plays there is one that escapes the limitations of sentimental nost... more Among Fugard's post-apartheid plays there is one that escapes the limitations of sentimental nostalgia evident in his recent turn inwards -The Train Driver (2010a). In this short play he develops a challenging sense of the country's dealings with the past by focusing upon the traumatic experience of a 'track suicide' remembered in morbidly excessive terms by the white driver, whose tragic story is told by a black gravedigger. The driver's hysteria, symptomatically the result of an identification with the death of the 'nameless one' whose burial place he seeks, is balanced by the sympathy and acceptance of the gravedigger who assists him in his quest. The dynamic between the two men, only fully graspable in performance, is at the centre of the play, which is set in a squatter camp cemetery, a liminal urban space emphasising the continuity of past wrongs in a country in which the conspicuous consumption and selective remembering of an elite masks everyday poverty and violence. What finally emerges is the continuing importance of theatre in conveying a recognition of individual suffering and loss that cannot and should not be ignored. The Train Driver may be said to engage in Adornian terms with an aesthetic of resistance to the present, denying redemptory longings.

Download

Remembering the Bushmen; nostalgia and postcolonial spiritualities

Exploring the shifting parameters of what counts as religion or spirituality in the postcolonial ... more

‘The Broken String’: Remembering the Homeland

‘Alone in a Landscape’: Remembering Doris Lessing’s Africa

Little Dorrit

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 12, 2012