Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts

by Jade Munslow Ong (Editor), Andrew van der Vlies (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399512541
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2025
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jade Munslow Ong is Associate Professor in World Literatures in English at the University of Salford, UK, and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, South African Modernism 1880–2020. She is author of Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (2018), and articles and chapters on colonial and postcolonial African literatures, animals and the environment in Victorian and world literatures, and decolonising pedagogies in Further Education. Jade is also a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker who appears in programmes on BBC Radio 3.

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. A graduate of Rhodes and Oxford Universityies, he is the author of essays and chapters on South African literatures, art history, gender studies and print cultures, and of the books Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford, 2017) and South African Textual Cultures (Manchester, 2007). He is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee (with Lucy Graham, Bloomsbury, 2023) and South African Writing in Transition (with Rita Barnard, Bloomsbury, 2019), and editor of Zoë Wicomb's Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays (Yale, 2018) and Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (Wits, 2012).

Table of Contents

Figures

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Olive Schreiner in the World: An Introduction, Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies

Part I Modernity and Modernism

1. Schreiner and the Machine, Mark Sanders

2. The Bloomsbury Modernisms of Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner, Jade Munslow Ong

3. Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: Proto-ecofeminists?, Dan Wylie

Part II Race and Anti-Racism

4. Olive Schreiner and C. F. Andrews: Utopia and Paths to Anti-Racism and Decolonisation, Barnita Bagchi

5. Turning Points: Olive Schreiner Changing Her Mind About Race Matters, Liz Stanley

6. Olive Schreiner, Race and Black South Africa: #RhodesMustFall and a 'Prophetic Vision of the Future', Janet Remmington

7. The Influence of Olive Schreiner on Howard Thurman and, through Thurman, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Heidi Barends

Part III Print, Publishing and Translation

8. Dreaming of Liberty: Olive Schreiner’s Ambivalent Anarchism, Clare Gill

9. The Reception of Olive Schreiner’s Work and Thought in the Dutch Press, Małgorzata Drwal

10. The Reception of Olive Schreiner in the Swedish Press, 1890–1920, Sanja Nivesjö

Part IV Antipodean Schreiner

11. Olive Schreiner and the New Women of New Zealand: Feminist Solidarities Across the Southern Colonies, Emma Barnes

12. The Story of an Australian Farm: Olive Schreiner in Australia, Nicholas Jose, Alex Sutcliffe and Mandy Treagus

Part V South African Afterlives

13. Passing It On: Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head, Dorothy Driver

14. Coetzee’s Schreiner, Schreiner’s Coetzee: Provincialising Allegory, Andrew van der Vlies

15. Olive Schreiner In/Beyond the Museum, Paul Walters and Jeremy Fogg

Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a landmark in Olive Schreiner studies and in South African cultural, social and intellectual history that establishes the global scale of Schreiner’s influence and influences. Engaging contemporary scholarly conversations on print history, ecology, Black diaspora, modernism and political activism, the book illuminates the shifting complexity of Schreiner’s thought.

Laura Chrisman