The Landscape of Empire: the Place of Landscape in 19th Century Colonial Novels

<p>This thesis presents a comparative research study of four novels published within two years of 1881 in four colonies of the Victorian Empire. The novels are Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life by Alexander Bathgate from New Zealand, Gathered In by Catherine Spence from Australia, Neville Trueman: The Pioneer Preacher, a Tale of the War of 1812 by W. H. Withrow from Canada, and finally The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner from South Africa. These novels were chosen because of their close publication dates. My purpose is to compare the depictions of landscape in each novel. The purpose of this study is to discover the depiction of landscape in the novels and the effect of the landscape on the characters. Because the authors were writing as English subjects in a non-English setting, they each had to engage differently with the landscape in their novel, depicting the settler experience of colonising the new country. Each novel’s portrayal of landscape is analysed using the text and placed into the historical context of the colony and the literary development of the colony. The findings of all four novels are compared to identify the differences and similarities discovered in the initial analysis. These final chapters show that landscape was closely tied with the settlers’ conceptions of religion, the treatment of the indigenous people, and settler experience in the particular colonies as represented by these authors. The importance of this thesis and the comparative study at the end is that my study gives an in depth analysis of four novels from four different colonies that have previously not been compared. The selection of the novels based solely on date of publication makes the comparison all the more interesting because these novels were not chosen due to their content, so the similarities and differences of the novels point out the similarities and differences of the authors’ literary portrayals of the colonies in a comparison study that has not yet been done.</p>

The Landscape of Empire: the Place of Landscape in 19th Century Colonial Novels

<p>This thesis presents a comparative research study of four novels published within two years of 1881 in four colonies of the Victorian Empire. The novels are Waitaruna: A Story of New Zealand Life by Alexander Bathgate from New Zealand, Gathered In by Catherine Spence from Australia, Neville Trueman: The Pioneer Preacher, a Tale of the War of 1812 by W. H. Withrow from Canada, and finally The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner from South Africa. These novels were chosen because of their close publication dates. My purpose is to compare the depictions of landscape in each novel. The purpose of this study is to discover the depiction of landscape in the novels and the effect of the landscape on the characters. Because the authors were writing as English subjects in a non-English setting, they each had to engage differently with the landscape in their novel, depicting the settler experience of colonising the new country. Each novel’s portrayal of landscape is analysed using the text and placed into the historical context of the colony and the literary development of the colony. The findings of all four novels are compared to identify the differences and similarities discovered in the initial analysis. These final chapters show that landscape was closely tied with the settlers’ conceptions of religion, the treatment of the indigenous people, and settler experience in the particular colonies as represented by these authors. The importance of this thesis and the comparative study at the end is that my study gives an in depth analysis of four novels from four different colonies that have previously not been compared. The selection of the novels based solely on date of publication makes the comparison all the more interesting because these novels were not chosen due to their content, so the similarities and differences of the novels point out the similarities and differences of the authors’ literary portrayals of the colonies in a comparison study that has not yet been done.</p>

“When in Doubt, Leave Out”:1 The Country Editor Who Declined to Publish a Long Letter from Olive Schreiner

The authors deal with six unpublished communications from Olive Schreiner to James Butler, Editor of the Cradock newspaper The Midland News and Karroo farmer between March 1893 and October 1905, as well as a reply from Butler to Schreiner. These documents are housed in the Cory Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University. Transcriptions by J. Fogg are appended. The heart of the article deals with Butler’s refusal to publish Schreiner’s “letter to the Women of Somerset East” which she had sent as a contribution to the protest meeting held in Somerset East on 12 October 1900 to mark the first anniversary of the declaration of the South African War. Keywords: Unpublished Schreiner Letters, South African War, Women’s Meeting Somerset East 12 October 1900, editorial policies, Cecil Rhodes’s control of the South African English language Press.

“Writer’s block” in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –

A new edition in 2015 by Dorothy Driver of the unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –, and the accessibility of Liz Stanley’s Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) have made it possible to speculate on reasons for Olive Schreiner’s apparent “writer’s block” in not completing the novel that she felt so passionately about and worked on intermittently for forty-seven years. I argue that Schreiner’s progress was impeded by several factors: her fixation on a rare flash of “illumination” which produced the novel’s exquisite Prelude; her conflating of the ending of the novel with her own end; her commitment to “baking bread” for her country; and her inclusion, near the end of the novel as it now stands, of a scene in which two characters express the agony and anxiety associated with publication. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, writer’s block

Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Joburg: Revisioning the Colonial Novel; or, From the Story of a Colony to a ‘South African’ Story

Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now

Olive Schreiner, War and Pacifism

Some new primary sources make an important contribution to re-thinking Olive Schreiner’s ideas about war and pacifism and are discussed in depth and their analytic reverberations explored. Many previously unknown Schreiner letters and postcards to her niece Lyndall (Dot) Schreiner have become available; Schreiner’s open letters, essays and allegories written over the Great War period have been collected and published; and the manuscripts of her unfinished treatise on war, conscientious objection and pacifism, The Dawn of Civilisation, have been edited in a completed version. These sources throw much light on the interconnections between Schreiner’s personal relationships, writing, feminism and pacifism. Taken together, they show that over the period of the Great War she was led to a new conviction that the aspects of human nature responsible for violence, conquest and killing were intractable and could be changed only in the distant future. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, letters, manuscripts, pacifism, violence, war

Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man: Alternative Models of Reality and the Problematics of Human Reasoning

This article considers the presence of evolutionary theory in Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man (1926) and the ways in which it evokes her notion of a horizontal equality between all life forms. Her model extends the materiality inherent in the evolutionary substructure to incorporate the noumenal. This in turn is validated by direct perception which, in Schreiner’s view, bypasses the distorting rational mind that she sees as responsible for creating hierarchical dualistic models. Such models for Schreiner reflect a tendency to categorise and label in order to separate and dominate. The article considers how Schreiner’s use of an experimental narrative form allows her to explore and express her egalitarian principles. It further proposes that a re-evaluation of From Man to Man is salutary in ourcurrent environmental crisis, as it reminds us of how an evolutionary, longterm and non-anthropocentric perspective can communicate the importance of the natural world. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, ecocriticism, evolutionary theory

A Bibliography of Biographical and Critical Works on Olive Schreiner by South African Academics and Researchers, 1994–2019

This selected bibliography consists of recent published biographical works on Olive Schreiner, literary criticism and multi-disciplinary studies of her writings by South African writers and critics from 1994 until 2019. A few works by foreign writers in South African book publications and literary journals have also been included. This bibliography has been drawn from the collection of the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature in Makhanda. It is hoped that this bibliography will promote interest in Olive Schreiner’s life and work. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, bibliographies