South African born Olive Schreiner was a
freethinker, a feminist, an anti-imperialist campaigner
and a bold literary experimentalist: unconventional and
troubled, her life and work illuminate the energies and
the conflicts that characterised the end of Victorianism
and the beginning of Modernism. Olive Schreiner, who was
born in 1855 in South Africa, has become a central
literary figure for thinking about the complex debates
surrounding gender, imperialism and class between 1880
and 1920. Aesthetically bold and politically passionate,
Schreiner wrote novels, short stories, lyrical fragments
she called dreams, as well as non-fiction and political
polemic. Her work is widely acknowledged as a
significant, though unconventional, contribution to the
New Woman debates of the fin de siècle, while her
anti-imperialism helped to challenge and reshape
feminist thinking. This volume explores Schreiner s
contribution to these debates, while also focusing on
the shaping influence of both religion and science on
her work. It discusses the range of her work, including
her novels, The Story of an African Farm, Undine, and
From Man to Man; her feminist tract Woman and Labour and
short fictions and allegories about the position of
women; and her diverse writings about South Africa, her
country of birth.
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