BOOK REVIEW: Carolyn Burdett. OLIVE SCHREINER AND THE PROGRESS OF FEMINISM: EVOLUTION, GENDER, EMPIRE . Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
2003; Indiana University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2979/ral.2003.34.3.196
ISSN1527-2044
Autores Tópico(s)Critical Theory and Philosophy
ResumoCarolyn Burdett's compactly argued Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Olive Schreiner studies. As with Laura Chrisman's recent Rereading the Imperial Romance, Burdett makes a strong case that Schreiner's writing allows us to see how significant apparently marginal colonial spaces were in shaping late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. Specifically, Burdett shows how contemporary discourses of evolution and progress, with their accompanying theories of gender, maternity, race, and degeneration, inflicted an ironic kind of progress on late nineteenth-century South Africa that involved massive physical, psychological, political, economic, and environmental disruption. Ushering in the new century, the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 stood for Schreiner as a model of the [End Page 196] way in which "progress" in England might manifest itself in South Africa as a "black-winged harbinger of death" (173). Schreiner herself, although serially disappointed in every cause she championed and painfully accurate in her pessimistic prophecies for twentieth-century South Africa, "never abandoned the task of trying to call into being something better" (174). Burdett very effectively brings out the tension between Schreiner's healing, woman-centered, future-oriented vision and the male-dominated discourses available to her to describe the violent, hurly-burly present of the world she experienced.
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