Learning from Nature: Feminism, Allegory and Ostriches in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883)
This essay explores the interconnections between the discourses on animals, the Empire and women, three domains in which the confidence of the late-Victorian male was being tested at the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner, whose alleg...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2017-03-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3200 |
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| Summary: | This essay explores the interconnections between the discourses on animals, the Empire and women, three domains in which the confidence of the late-Victorian male was being tested at the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the South African novelist and essayist Olive Schreiner, whose allegorical turn of mind and intimate knowledge of the Veld predisposed her to look towards animals as conveyors of argumentative meaning. It contextualizes her first novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), within the ostrich boom and the feather trade of the 1880s and 1890s. It examines how the ostrich participates in an aesthetic of relations, which ranges from Schreiner’s allegorical practice to the reader’s method of interpreting the novel. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |