ARTFUL TALES OF ORIGINATION IN OLIVE SCHREINER'S THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM

2004 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. L. SHAPPLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African Culture ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Colonial Art ◽  
At Home

Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) has long been considered an anticolonial novel that nevertheless, because of its author's affiliation with a European colonial culture, neglects to investigate the problem of disenfranchised African labor in significant detail. In this essay I reassess Schreiner's anticolonialism by placing it in the context of her growing postcolonial aspirations. This rather paradoxical position of the colonist becoming a postcolonial manifests itself in the novel's central artist figure, Waldo, who, while descended from European colonists, manages to make himself at home in his South African environment. Employing nineteenth-century ethnological and aesthetic discourses in the construction of this curious figure (which I refer to as the colonial indigene), Schreiner establishes a connection among the novel, colonial art, and an indigenous South African culture. The novel's narrative present is set during a period of intense border struggle, and while indigenous artists like the San known to the colonists as the Bushmen) have disappeared from the novel's narrative present, Schreiner's colonial indigene takes their place. This imaginative displacement thus corresponds with a demographic one, while also manifesting itself in The Story of an African Farm through a fetishistic aesthetic and the uncanny return of a frequently overlooked African laborer.

scholarly journals Exporting ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism and Colonial Settler Identity

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
Sarah Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
The Self ◽  
The South ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Cultural Baggage ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

A Scottish literary icon of the nineteenth century, Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ was a key component of the cultural baggage carried by emigrant Scots seeking a new life abroad. The myth of the thrifty, humble and pious Scottish cottager is a recurrent figure in Scottish colonial writing whether that cottage is situated in the South African veld or the Otago bush. This article examines the way in which Burns's cotter informed the myth of the self-sufficient Scottish peasant in the poetry of John Barr and Thomas Pringle. It will argue that, just as ‘The Cotter’ could be used to reinforce a particular set of ideas about Scottish identity at home, Scottish settlers used Burns's poem to respond to and cement new identities abroad.

London and Cloisterham as an Imperial ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Magdalena Pypeć
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Government ◽  
Close Collaboration ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
The Face ◽  
At Home

Abstract The article examines Dickens’s last novel in the context of British imperialism, contraband opium trade in nineteenth-century China under the armed protection of the British government, and the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860). Although Dickens has often been discussed as one of the authors who approved of his country’s imperial domination, his last novel foregrounds a critique of colonial practices. The atavistic character of imperialism takes its moral and psychological toll not merely somewhere in the dominions, colonies, protectorates, and other territories but also ‘at home’ on the domestic ground. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood London has the face of a dingy and dark opium den or the ominous headquarters of the Heaven of Philanthropy with the professing philanthropists in suits of black. Moreover, the article seeks to discuss deep-rooted evil and darkness associated in the novel with an ecclesiastical town in connection with Protestant missionaries’ close collaboration with opium traders in the Celestial Empire. Portraying John Jasper’s moral degradation enhanced by the drug and the corruption of the ecclesiastical town, Dickens gothicises opium, and by implication, opium trade pointing to its double-edged sword effect: sullying and debasing both the addict and the trafficker. The symbolic darkness of the opium den and the churchly Cloisterham reflects the inherent evil latent in any unbridled colonial expansion and Dickens’s anti-colonial purpose.

scholarly journals Uncanny Exposures: Mobility, Repetition and Desire in Front of a Camera

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgia Alu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spatial Distance ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Italian Diaspora ◽  
At Home

In this article I discuss some of the uncanny characteristics of photographic portraits by turning attention to photographs representing Italian migrants in Australia. These are images of mobility through time and space. These photographs also reduced spatial distance, transporting migrants’ own desires and unknown faraway lives into the imagination of the viewers at home. The migrant’s desire is for both a new life (as it will be mostly discussed here) and for familiar affects. It is also—in Lacanian terms—a desire from the Other: the desire to be the object of the Other’s desire, emotions and gaze.In particular, I will analyse studio photographic portraits produced in Australia during the initial period of the Italian diaspora from the end of the nineteenth century to the first three decades of the twentieth century. By drawing mostly from Freud’s definition of the uncanny and Barthes’s reflection on photography, I will look at these photographs as uncanny visual traces—and promoters—of emotions, desire and of a journey to a multi-faced identity.  

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Learning Zulu

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
South African ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
African History ◽  
African Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Correct Form ◽  
Linguistic Purism

When this book's author began studying Zulu, he was often questioned why he was learning it. This book places the author's endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South African history, Zulu became a battleground for issues of property, possession, and deprivation. The book combines elements of analysis and memoir to explore a complex cultural history. Perceiving that colonial learners of Zulu saw themselves as repairing harm done to Africans by Europeans, the book reveals deeper motives at work in the development of Zulu-language learning—from the emergence of the pidgin Fanagalo among missionaries and traders in the nineteenth century to widespread efforts, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to teach a correct form of Zulu. The book looks at the white appropriation of Zulu language, music, and dance in South African culture, and at the association of Zulu with a martial masculinity. In exploring how Zulu has come to represent what is most properly and powerfully African, the book examines differences in English- and Zulu-language press coverage of an important trial, as well as the role of linguistic purism in xenophobic violence in South Africa. Through one person's efforts to learn the Zulu language, the book explores how a language's history and politics influence all individuals in a multilingual society.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

Thérèse Raquin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.

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