Olive Schreiner And African Modernism

This book works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods, places, and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor, postcolonialism, and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures, in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner’s three novels, Undine, The Story of An African Farm, and From Man to Man, in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors, in whose writings the impact of Schreiner’s politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Solomon T. Plaatje, and Zoe Wicomb, amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies, ecocriticism, and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender, race, empire, and modernism.

A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.

[headline]Examines Olive Schreiner's writing, networks and legacies in new global, historical and contemporary contexts This collection of essays considers the significance of South African-born writer, activist and thinker Olive Schreiner in international and multidisciplinary contexts in her time - and the ongoing relevance of her work to our own. A leading writer of New Woman Fiction at the fin de siècle, Schreiner influenced generations of readers, not to mention other writers. Taken together, these essays make the argument for a 'new' Schreiner Studies drawing on recent developments in scholarship on global and peripheral modernisms, activist networks and intersectionality, posthumanism, memory studies and intermediality. They position Schreiner's work and legacy as significant for understanding literary and social archives, race and gender performance, and the rise of literary modernism in the global Anglosphere. [editor bios]Jade Munslow Ong is Reader in English Literature at the University of Salford, UK and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project South African Modernism 1880-2020. Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

"From Man to Man" is a feminist novel by the first South African-born novelist Olive Schreiner. The story tells of two white women, Rebekah and Bertie. They are sisters born into the racist and sexist society of mid-nineteenth-century South Africa. One of them remains in the Cape, marries, and has children. The other becomes a kept woman and a prostitute in London's East End. The novel's main question is, how far are marriage and prostitution apart in a world where women are valued mainly for their bodies?

This book explores the thought of Olive Schreiner, the internationally famous writer, feminist theorist, social critic, opponent of imperialism and nationalism, and analyst of violence and war, best known for her novels and short stories, articles and critical commentaries, and her feminist treatise, Women and Labour. Expounding her groundbreaking ideas and analyses to a new generation of sociologists, it presents Schreiner as one of the first proponents of an intersectional analysis, in her treatment of the great questions of the age – on labour, women and race – as mutually reinforcing and also bound together with capitalism, imperialism and war in society. Through an analysis of her use of different genres of writing in representing the complexities of social life and oppressions, the author reveals a combination of social theory with practical substantive examples and analysis at the core of Schreiner’s intellectual and moral project – an approach that put her at odds with her contemporaries but shows her to be a forerunner of present-day sociological thinking. An examination of the significance for sociology of the work of a figure, the importance of whose thought is only now being recognised, Reintroducing Olive Schreiner will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in the history of the discipline, intersectionality and methods of research and analysis.

Schreiner's life is central to her texts. In this study Cherry Clayton explores Schreiner's fiction and nonfiction as "complementary aspects of the same developing mind and art." Without reducing Schreiner's literature to the purely autobiographical, Clayton suggests that Schreiner's fictional accounts of spiritual and social unconventionality are profoundly tied to the author's experiences as a young woman.

Dreams is a work that defies conventional categorization; however, one might best capture its unique formal structure by construing it as a series of prose poems or narrative paintings, a starkly modern text inflected by the far older tradition of the medieval dream-vision poem. Though a work of prophecy, it proceeds with a light touch. The sequence of eleven dreams, loosely interlinked, leaves us to wrestle with our doubts; it takes up thorny questions that challenge a culture right where it may tend to be its proudest. The landscape of the work shifts as it moves among the African savannah, congested late-industrial London, and the olive tree-studded hillsides of Italy. The intersectionality of Schreiner’s writing—its concern with gender, sexual orientation, class, nation, and race—makes her a particularly salient voice for today’s students. The appendices to this edition provide an accessible representation of Schreiner’s key contexts, South African and British as well as American. The introduction features a biographical overview of a writer wrestling with questions of social justice pertinent to her own era yet relevant to our contemporary moment.

London's literary and cultural scene fostered newly configured forms of feminist anticolonialism during the modernist period. Through their writing in and about the imperial metropolis, colonial women authors not only remapped the city, they also renegotiated the position of women within the empire. This book examines the significance of gender to the interwoven nature of empire and modernism. As transgressive figures of modernity, writers such as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson and Sarojini Naidu brought their own versions of modernity to the capital, revealing the complex ways in which colonial identities 'traveled' to London at the turn of the twentieth century. Anna Snaith's timely and original study provides a new vantage point on the urban metropolis and its artistic communities for scholars and students of literary modernism, gender and postcolonial studies, and English literature more broadly.