Landscape Iconography in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer’s extraordinarily evocative depictions of the African landscape have attracted both considerable admiration and the most dismissive scorn as mere ‘verbal photography’ and ‘local colour’.2 However, the extent to which such descriptive passages both reflect a firmly established though barely acknowledged tradition of landscape representation within South African English-language fiction as a whole, and also express the particular dimensions of her own unique experience of the South African landscape as first apprehended in childhood, and then transformed by the imperatives of her political and ideological project in the novels, has barely been examined.3