Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- A Note on Referencing -- Epigraph -- 1 Enter Olive Schreiner -- The Woman Who Fits the Crisis -- The Method of the Life We All Lead -- What Follows -- 2 A Life in Context -- Introduction -- Freethinking, Ethics and Relationships -- The New Women and the Not So New Men -- South Africa: Turning With a Keen Relish to the External World -- Marriage, Politics and 'Race' -- War, Pacifism and Social Change -- 3 Olive Schreiner's Writings -- Introduction -- Writing, As Such -- The Works -- Her letters -- The novels, finished and unfinished -- Dreams, stories and allegories -- A watershed: the Wollstonecraft fragment -- South African writings: of politics, citizens and states -- Thoughts on South Africa -- The political situation -- Trooper Peter -- An English South African's view of the situation -- Closer union -- Women and labour: value, care and civilising men -- Peace and war: from social mothering to the genesis of human aggression -- Perhaps Only ... -- And Now - -- 4 Interpretations -- Will the Real Olive Schreiner Please Stand Up? -- The Damaged Genius -- The Asthmatic Personality -- Some Fatal Emotional Flaw -- In the Prison-House of Colonialism -- The Social Darwinist -- The Healing Imagination -- Distinguished by a Paradox -- Or, A Woman of Her Time -- 5 When The Curtain Falls ... Olive Schreiner's Social Theory Reconsidered -- Introduction -- What Kind of Feminist Theory Did Olive Schreiner Write? -- The method of the life we all lead -- A striving and a striving and an ending in nothing -- Times and seasons -- Misty figures ... the rustle of paper passing from hand to hand -- Imperialism is the euphonious title of a deadly disease -- It left out one whole field -- to me personally, the most important -- As we sow so shall we reap -- Sex parasitism.

A social labour theory of value -- Now with the male sex form, and then with the female -- The desire for vulgar domination and empire, which has ensnared us all -- Small states tell for more in favour of freedom and good government -- I often ... wonder what all my work would be like when it is done -- Some 'Was She ... ?' Questions and Answers -- Was she ... a misogynist? -- Was she ... a maternalist? -- Was she ... a social Darwinist? -- Was she ... a racist? -- Was she ... an essentialist? -- And a Few 'Why Did She ... ?' Ones -- Why my positive response? -- Why the more critical response? -- Why did she vanish? -- A Final Comment -- Appendix: Schreiner Writings and Archive Collections -- References and Annotated Bibliography -- Index -- Name Index.

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was the best-known feminist theorist and writer of her time. Her writings spanned a number of conventionally separate genres (including the novel, short story, allegory, political essay, polemic and theoretical treatise), which she crafted to produce a highly distinctive feminist and analytical 'voice'. A feminist who was contemporaneously an internationally-renowned social commentator, Schreiner's developing political analysis was - and still is - highly original. She developed a materially-based socialist and feminist analysis of 'labour' which led her to theorise social and economic change, divisions of labour in society and between women and men, capitalism and imperialism, around innovative ideas about how -- and by whom -- economic and social value was produced. She combined with this a keen attention to inter-personal relations, between women as literally or politically sisters, between 'respectable' and sexually outcast women, between feminist women and the 'New Men', and within the family. Distinctively, Schreiner's writings on economic and political life in South Africa criticised the policies and practice of Rhodes in the Cape Colony and British imperialism in southern Africa more widely. She opposed the South African War of 1899-1902, promoted federation rather than union as the form the South African state should take and insisted on equal political rights for all. Schreiner steadfastly opposed the development of apartheid segregationist policies and provided a radical analysis of the relationship between 'race' and capital. Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman is based on primary archive research, making particular use of Schreiner's unpublished letters and other major manuscript sources to provide a major reconceptualisation of the scope and importance of her writings and innovative and experimental

ideas about genre and form. It offers a major rethinking of Schreiner's political writings on South Africa, and it emphasises the distinctiveness of Schreiner's contribution as the major feminist theorist of her age and that which followed. The book will appeal particularly to readers interested in the development of social theory, in influential feminist ideas and writing of the fin de sicle period, in the contemporary critique of capitalism and imperialism, and in 'the age of imperialism' in Southern Africa, as well as to Women's Studies scholars across the academic disciplines.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.