Olive Schreiner

Examines Olive Schreiner's writing, networks and legacies in new global, historical and contemporary contexts 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 othersChapters are 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 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 si cle, 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.

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 Universities, 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).