Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Joburg: Revisioning the Colonial Novel; or, From the Story of a Colony to a ‘South African’ Story

Abstract

Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel

Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now