Olive Schreiner and African Modernism

<p>This book<i> </i>works across established categories of modernism and postcolonialism in order to radically revise the periods places and topics traditionally associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature. The book is the first account of Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. The book draws on and broadens discussions in and around the blossoming field of global modernist studies by interrogating the conventionally accepted genealogy of development that positions Europe and America as the sites of innovation. It provides an original examination of the relationships between metaphor postcolonialism and modernist experimentation by showing how politically and aesthetically innovative African forms rely on allegorical structures in contrast to the symbolism dominant in Euro-American modernism. An original theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial Marxist and ecocritical approaches to literature. The book provides original readings of Schreiner’s three novels <i>Undine</i> <i>The Story of An African Farm</i> and <i>From Man to Man</i><i> </i>in light of the new theory of primitivism in African literature by directly addressing the issue of narrative form. This argument is contextualised in relation to the work of other Southern African authors in whose writings the impact of Schreiner’s politics and aesthetics can be traced. These authors include J.M. Coetzee Nadine Gordimer Doris Lessing Solomon T. Plaatje and Zoe Wicomb amongst others. This book brings the most current debates in modernist studies ecocriticism and primitivism into the field of postcolonial studies and contributes to a widening of the debates surrounding gender race empire and modernism.</p>