Dreams

Olive Schreiner

Okt 2020 · Broadview Press

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Dreams is a work that defies conventional categorization; however, one might best capture its unique formal structure by construing it as a series of prose poems or narrative paintings, a starkly modern text inflected by the far older tradition of the medieval dream-vision poem. Though a work of prophecy, it proceeds with a light touch. The sequence of eleven dreams, loosely interlinked, leaves us to wrestle with our doubts; it takes up thorny questions that challenge a culture right where it may tend to be its proudest. The landscape of the work shifts as it moves among the African savannah, congested late-industrial London, and the olive tree-studded hillsides of Italy. The intersectionality of Schreiner’s writing—its concern with gender, sexual orientation, class, nation, and race—makes her a particularly salient voice for today’s students.

The appendices to this edition provide an accessible representation of Schreiner’s key contexts, South African and British as well as American. The introduction features a biographical overview of a writer wrestling with questions of social justice pertinent to her own era yet relevant to our contemporary moment.

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Barbara Black is Professor of English at Skidmore College and Graduate Faculty at The School of Letters, The University of the South. Carly Nations is an M.A. graduate at The University of the South. Anna Spydell is an M.A. candidate at The University of the South.