Wednesday, January 7, 2009

SS Course 2009: C. Louis Leipoldt and His English Historical Novels

Course 152
Date: 19–23 January
Time: 8.00 pm
Full Price: R270,00 Staff: R135,00 Reduced: R70,00


C. Louis Leipoldt and His English Historical Novels
Presented by Professor Trevor Emslie, publisher and Faculty of Law, UCT

N.P. van Wyk Louw said of C. Louis Leipoldt after his death: ‘In the days of our greatest distress Leipoldt was the heart of the Afrikaans nation … [he] gave words to our grief’. While Leipoldt’s Afrikaans work is well known, few people realise the full extent of his literary legacy, and this course hopes to stimulate greater appreciation of his English oeuvre.

Leipoldt was not only a poet, playwright and novelist, but a paediatrician, botanist, journalist, cook and wine connoisseur. In The Valley, a historical trilogy set in the Cederberg, Leipoldt preserves priceless gems from South Africa’s heritage. He wrote the trilogy, which delves deep into the South African psyche, in his fifties, during a particularly productive period of his creative life. In the three related novels (Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack and The Mask) he portrays the harmony of pre-war Cape Colonial life on the farm; the calamity of the Anglo-Boer War; and conflicting allegiances in a village recognisable as Clanwilliam in the 1920s. The course will offer biographical insights into Leipoldt in all his facets, in order to convey a sense of a man ahead of his time, who critically appraised life in South Africa in a manner both sympathetic and startlingly modern.

LECTURE TITLES
  1. C. Louis Leipoldt: South African man of the world.
  2. Gallows Gecko: comedic insight in a pre-war colonial valley.
  3. Stormwrack: civil war in the Cederberg.
  4. The Mask: the aftermath of war and polemical life in a bucolic Cape village.
  5. Leipoldt the connoisseur: the poetry’s in the taste, the flavour in the words.

Recommended reading

  • Leipoldt, C. Louis. The Valley: A trilogy comprising Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack & The Mask. Stormberg Publishers, 2002,

or the individual novels, all published by Cederberg Publishers.

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