About FDU Press

Simultaneously harsh realist and utopian dreamer, resistant and reactionary, Head (1937-86) may more fully embody the contradictions of South Africa under Apartheid than any other writer of her time. Faced with a small and difficult body of published works--an output limited by both the poignant and brevity of Head's life and her recurring episodes of mental disintegration--readers have typically sought an elusive critical or theoretical distance. Brown tries instead a form of total immersion. Using both Head's published work and the thousands of pages of letters and unpublished materials preserved in Botswana (where Head lived out her life of self-imposed exile), Brown intuits her way toward critical empathy, sidestepping postmodern theories (post-coloniality, feminism) in favor of the older, more metaphysical "archetypal" models of Jung and Northrop Frye. The resulting study, entering fully (often with more passion than clarity) into Head's parallel universe, reaches a high point in its exploration of Head's canonical A Question of Power (CH, Jul'74). The volume includes a 75-page appendix of previously unpublished letters and uses a works-cited method of citation and bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers."