ABSTRACT
By setting her novel, The Devil’s Chimney (1998), in the Oudsthoorn district of the Little Karoo, Anne Landsman is inevitably inserting her text into a traditional South African genre, that of the farm novel (whose Afrikaans equivalent is the plaasroman). Like the notion of the bush in Australian literature, the farm in white South African literature has been a trope of embedded ideology, often expressing an ambivalent and contested sense of belonging and alienation. Jennifer Wenzel, following J. M. Coetzee’s seminal essay on the farm novel and the plaasroman, has summarised the generic features of the plaasroman as follows:
its prominence in a time of profound change, its pastoral response to new modes of agriculture and land ownership, its difficulty with the representation of black labor, and its narrative reliance on the threat of losing the farm as an epiphanic moment of ‘lineal consciousness’. . .
