Beyond Gold and Diamonds: Genre, the Authorial Informant, and the British South African Novel

Melissa Free

Mar 2021 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Beyond Gold and Diamonds demonstrates the importance of southern Africa to British literature from the 1880s to the 1920s, from the rise of the systematic exploitation of the region's mineral wealth to the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on fiction by the colonial-born Olive Schreiner, southern Africa's first literary celebrity, as well as by H. Rider Haggard, Gertrude Page, and John Buchan, its most influential authorial informants, British authors who spent significant time in the region and wrote about it as insiders. Tracing the ways in which generic innovation enabled these writers to negotiate cultural and political concerns through a uniquely British South African lens, Melissa Free argues that British South African literature constitutes a distinct field, one that overlaps with but also exists apart from both a national South African literary tradition and a tradition of South African literature in English. The various genres that British South African novelists introduced—the New Woman novel, the female colonial romance, the Rhodesian settler romance, and the modern spy thriller—anticipated metropolitan literary developments while consolidating Britain's sense of its own dominion in a time of increasing opposition.

Ratings and reviews

I really feel that our country was and is beautiful but I can say that as an activism I stand for those who were going underground to mine gold and diamond and come back ean peanut but those whom are foreigners white foreigners who came in the continent of a black man and oppresse him and anslaved him in manner that is unprofessional or humanness of a person but what can I say Malema fight fight for yourown of the soil whom the ruiling party betrayed by emphasising corruption in our economy ...why can't people be encouraged enough into technical expertise and make our own economy more diverse where we can extract , manucture and export/sell/ tertiary instead of mining minerals such as gold and diamonds then sell them abroad then buy them from abroad in huge amount of revenue..in other countries such USA there are more diverse and have achieved full employment that's what Comrade Malema is all about and I Themba Mpheqeke Toli I give the EFF my vote cos I know they can the economy sin..

About the author

Melissa Free is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University.