Search results for ""Author Olive Schreiner""

This is a trilogy of Olive Schreiner's farm novels, Undine, The Story of an African Farm and From Man to Man. The author was pitch-forked into prominence by the publication in 1883 of The Story of an African Farm, originally published under the pseudonym 'Ralph Iron'. The other two novels were published posthumously. Undine was in fact completed before The Story of an African Farm, and many consider From Man to Man, the book she cherished most, to be her best novel. Karoo Moon is classic Africana by South Africa's first internationally recognised author; and each of the novels has strongly autobiographical elements, helping the reader to understand a remarkable woman who went on to become an outspoken anti-colonial, pro-Boer campaigner during the Anglo-Boer War, South Africa's first feminist, and a prescient supporter of her disfranchised fellow citizens.

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The Story of an African Farm (1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests of Lyndall and Waldo, who each struggle against social constraints in their search for happiness and truth: Lyndall, against society’s expectations of women, and Waldo against stifling class conventions. Written from the margins of the British empire, the novel addresses the conflicts of race, class, and gender that shaped the lives of European settlers in Southern Africa before the Boer Wars.This Broadview edition includes appendices that link the novel to histories of empire and colonialism, the emergence of the New Woman, and the conflicts between science and religion in the Victorian period. Contemporary reviews are also included.

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Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Dreams is a work that defies conventional categorization; however, one might best capture its unique formal structure by construing it as a series of prose poems or narrative paintings, a starkly modern text inflected by the far older tradition of the medieval dream vision poem. Arthur Symons praised Dreams by saying, “The words seem to chant themselves to a music which we do not hear.” Though a work of prophecy, it proceeds with a light touch. The sequence of eleven dreams, loosely interlinked, leaves us to wrestle with our doubts; it takes up thorny questions that challenge a culture right where it may tend to be its proudest. The landscape of the work shifts as it moves among the African savannah, congested late-industrial London, and the olive tree-studded hillsides of Italy. The intersectionality of Schreiner’s writing—its concern with gender, sexual orientation, class, nation, and race—makes her a particularly salient voice for today’s students. The appendices to this edition provide an accessible representation of Schreiner’s key contexts, South African and British as well as American. The introduction provides a biographical overview of a writer wrestling with questions of social justice pertinent to her own era, yet relevant to our contemporary moment.

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