We're thrilled to celebrate the publication of our co-edited collection, Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts, which came out with Edinburgh University Press last month.
Copies can be purchased here with 30% off if you enter NEW30 at checkout.
The collection 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.
The book:
examines aspects of Schreiner’s radical thought, including her feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, pacifism, environmentalism, and ambivalent anarchism, as well as their impacts on civil rights movements, global feminisms, and global literary modernisms
explores revealing and sometimes unexpected connections, affinities and lines of influence that link Schreiner’s work with its widespread influence and afterlife
includes essays by leading and emerging Schreiner scholars working across English Studies, Modernist Studies, Comparative Literature, Sociology, Museum Studies, Publishing History
discusses Schreiner’s work in relation to major global literary and historical figures including W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr, Charles Freer Andrews, J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf, Bessie Head and Patrick White, amongst others
is driven by a shared impetus to uncover and analyse the anticipatory and galvanising roles of political and artistic forces that emerge from Southern Africa through case studies on Schreiner
The collection is described by Prof Laura Chrisman (Washington) as '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.'
We are planning a book launch in Salford on Friday 15th March 2024 - details to follow!
Contents
Introduction
Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies, 'Olive Schreiner in the World: An Introduction'
Part I Modernity and Modernism
1. Mark Sanders, 'Schreiner and the Machine'
2. Jade Munslow Ong, 'The Bloomsbury Modernisms of Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner'
3. Dan Wylie, 'Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: Proto-ecofeminists?'
Part II Race and Anti-Racism
4. Barnita Bagchi, 'Olive Schreiner and C. F. Andrews: Utopia and Paths to Anti-Racism and Decolonisation'
5. Liz Stanley, 'Turning Points: Olive Schreiner Changing Her Mind About Race Matters'
6. Janet Remmington, 'Olive Schreiner, Race and Black South Africa: #RhodesMustFall and a "Prophetic Vision of the Future"'
7. Heidi Barends, 'The Influence of Olive Schreiner on Howard Thurman and, through Thurman, on Martin Luther King, Jr.'
Part III Print, Publishing and Translation
8. Clare Gill, 'Dreaming of Liberty: Olive Schreiner’s Ambivalent Anarchism'
9. Małgorzata Drwal, 'The Reception of Olive Schreiner’s Work and Thought in the Dutch Press'
10. Sanja Nivesjö, 'The Reception of Olive Schreiner in the Swedish Press, 1890–1920'
Part IV Antipodean Schreiner
11. Emma Barnes, 'Olive Schreiner and the New Women of New Zealand: Feminist Solidarities Across the Southern Colonies'
12. Nicholas Jose, Alex Sutcliffe and Mandy Treagus, 'The Story of an Australian Farm: Olive Schreiner in Australia'
Part V South African Afterlives
13. Dorothy Driver, 'Passing It On: Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head'
14. Andrew van der Vlies, 'Coetzee’s Schreiner, Schreiner’s Coetzee: Provincialising Allegory'
15. Paul Walters and Jeremy Fogg, 'Olive Schreiner In/Beyond the Museum'
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