Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts

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 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.

Jade Munslow Ong is Reader in English Literature 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 (Routledge, 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).