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This article reflects on the research required in biographical studies. The biographical focus is on the role of three generations of the Schreiner family: W.P. Schreiner (one-time Prime Minister of the Cape Colony), Justice O.D. Schreiner (judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court) and Professor G.D.L. Schreiner (scientist, academic, liberal and early conceptualiser of alternative models to apartheid). All three were involved in developing, defending and sustaining liberal policies and values in South Africa from the late 19th century until the advent of democracy in 1994. The clarifications and contradictions within and between oral and written sources are examined, and individual cases are discussed in which they are highlighted. The research sources include family papers, official archives, publications and, crucially, oral testimony. The oral testimony includes formal and informal interviews. This study is a contribution to the history of a family, a university and a set of values. It covers a long period in South African history during which colonialism tightened into apartheid, resistance developed and the eventual vision of a democratic South Africa came to fruition. Contribution: The primary scientific contribution is the exploration of liberal policies and values in South African political and academic history through the prism of biography. Methodologically, the article discusses possible shortcomings with oral testimony when relied on as a sole source and examines how oral evidence can be utilised in conjunction with research based on archival and published sources to develop a fuller and more nuanced picture in biographical research.

The First World War writings of Betty Freund and Frances Lyndall Schreiner are the only available primary accounts by volunteer nurses from the Union of South Africa who served in the European theatre of war. The reluctance of Union women to volunteer to the British war effort were informed by several historical factors in the decades before the war, yet Betty's letters and Frances' narratives reveal similar experiences to those of volunteer nurses of other nationalities.Both women wrote to inform, yet Betty also felt a need to reassure, while Frances aspired to publication and employed contemporary literary conventions. On the surface, their texts show nursing and care for young soldiers were their priority, yet a deeper analysis reveals issues of national identity and their reactions to the contemporary views of nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dog in Schreiner’s novel is represented both as an individualized human companion and as a figure of the social outcast. This split signification is homologous with other such instances in the novel - the anomaly of a “failed” bildungsroman, the narrative division between the real and the dreamlike, the aporia of human consciousness in the face of nature, the entanglements of gender, the problematics of race. Focusing on Waldo, Lyndall, and the dog Doss, the paper tracks the way in which the dog refracts not only the relation between human and animal but also a range of other relations in the novel, social and metaphysical. Reading the novel and its late nineteenth-century contexts of thought from the retrospective standpoint of the present - a hermeneutic position that is itself the site of a split signification - the paper considers the dog good to think with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin' Bonaparte (2004) presents a post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner's 1883 English novel The Story of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lister's comedic film radically revises Schreiner's tragic novel to witness the hopeful post-apartheid nationalism of Africa's children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his published works MK Gandhi frequently refers the concept of ‘civilisation’. Gandhi divided this concept into two distinct types: modern and ancient. The former he identified chiefly with western industrial and technological civilisation that had, in his view, reduced the West to a state of ‘cultural anarchy’, while he viewed the latter far more positively. In his Platonic dialogue,Hind Swaraj, this distinction is drawn very emphatically.Hind Swarajwas strongly influenced by Edward Carpenter's essayCivilisation: Its Cause and Cure, in which Carpenter draws an analogy between civilisation and disease. Carpenter's essay rested in turn on the earlier anthropological researches of Lewis Morgan inAncient Society, a substantial part of which is devoted to the structure of ancient Greek society, and which largely inspired Friedrich Engels to compose his study of the origin of the family. This article explores the implications of these debates on social structure, attitudes to property, and gender relations, which were shared by Carpenter's close friend Olive Schreiner, the proto-feminist author ofThe Story of an African Farm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article grew out of a paper given at a conference on the History of the Book. It brings together numerous critical perspectives on Schreiner's neglected novella and reconsiders the importance of allegory as genre for Schreiner. It traces in detail the history of the (problematic) photographic frontispiece, and adds new information on its provenance yielded by material in the custody of NELM. It argues that the suppression of the frontispiece until 1974 may be seen as symptomatic of the neglect of the work as whole, and suggests that this might be attributed to the sheer raw power of both to call into question the entire imperialistic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]