Olive Schreiner Influence Symposium

Olive Schreiner’s Influence and Afterlives

A South/South Symposium of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at The University of Adelaide

Co-hosted with the School of Humanities and the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film

This symposium tracks the influence and afterlives of South African author and feminist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920, Cape Colony) across Australian and southern African literatures with a focus on Catherine Edith Macauley Martin (1848-1937, UK/South Australia), Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946, Australia/UK), Patrick White (1912-1990, UK/Australia), Bessie Head (1937-1986, South Africa/Botswana), and JM Coetzee (b.1940, South Africa/Australia). Three papers in progress towards the collection Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (edited by Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies) will be presented for discussion.

Zoom link: https://adelaide.zoom.us/j/85863262740?pwd=MzI0b2JXd2lWck9Oa2NLSHpmWUdSZz 

Passcode: 033365

PROGRAMME

1. ‘The Story of an Australian Farm’

Mandy Treagus, Nicholas Jose and Alex Sutcliffe

Discussant: Susan Sheridan

Break

2. ‘Passing It On: Olive Schreiner and Bessie Head’

Dorothy Driver

3. ‘Coetzee's Schreiner / Schreiner's Coetzee: Provincializing Allegory’

Andrew van der Vlies 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Mandy Treagus is of Welsh, Scottish and Cornish descent, and lives on the unceded lands of the Peramangk peoples. She is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches and researches literature, culture, and visual studies. Her publications include Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age, and the co-edited collections Changing the Victorian Subject and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter.

Nicholas Jose has published seven novels, including Paper Nautilus, The Custodians, The Red Thread and Original Face, and three collections of short stories. His non-fiction includes Chinese Whispers, Cultural Essays and an acclaimed memoir, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola.  He is an Adjunct Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University and Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide.

Alex Sutcliffe is an MPhil candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide on unceded Kaurna land. Alex wrote an honours thesis on Patrick White's The Aunt's Story and The Twyborn Affair. Since then, they have written several poems and gushing essays about friends' art exhibitions.

Susan Sheridan is Professor Emerita in Humanities at Flinders University and Visiting Research Fellow in English at Adelaide. A member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she has published widely on women’s writing, feminist cultural studies and Australian cultural history. Her latest books are The Fiction of Thea Astley (Cambria Press, Amherst NY, 2016) and Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark (University of Queensland Press, 2011).

Dorothy Driver holds the title of Visiting Researcher at University of Adelaide, where she taught part time in the English department for several years. She is also Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town. In 2015 she published a re-edited version of Olive Schreiner’s unfinished novel From Man to Man or Perhaps Only. 

Andrew van der Vlies was born in South Africa's Eastern Cape province and educated there and at the University of Oxford. He has published on South African literatures, literary histories, print cultures, and art, and taught at the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary University of London. He is Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, and Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide.