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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'The Flaming Terrapin' and 'Valley of a Thousand Hills': Campbell, Dhlomo and the 'Brief Epic'
Author:Voss, TonyISNI
Year:2006
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:32
Issue:3
Period:September
Pages:449-466
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:poetry
epics
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
About persons:Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901-1957)ISNI
Herbert I.E. Dhlomo (1903-1956)ISNI
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070600829476
Abstract:'Epic' is a controversial category in the study of both oral record and performance and literature in South Africa, although the form has achieved a variety of manifestations. This article examines two early twentieth-century South African poems, Roy Campbell's 'The Flaming Terrapin' (1924) and Herbert Dhlomo's 'Valley of a Thousand Hills: A Poem' (1942), arguing that both can be identified as 'brief epic', a form crucial to modernism. While both are post-Romantic, the two poets engage with the form in different ways: Dhlomo's is Wordsworthian, while Campbell's tends to the neo-Miltonic and is part of early modernism's re-discovery of myth. As regards the communal energy of epic, Dhlomo's poem is national in its implications, while Campbell's is mundane and individualistic. Yet the coincidence of form and mode, as well as the poets' historical contiguity, suggest that both may be read as contributing to South African literature as a coherent order. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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