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

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