Olive Schreiner’s “The Story of an African Farm” and the Question of Progress

The Christian Literary Imagination Series

Continuing from the previous academic year, over the course of the 2021-22 academic year the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of webinars on the Christian literary imagination in collaboration with Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. The ‘Christian Literary Imagination Series’ will explore the role and function of the arts and humanities in the development of the individual and society.

The hour-long virtual events will be followed by a Q & As chaired by Professor Michael Scott and Rev Fr Joseph Simmons SJ. These events are free and hosted on Zoom by Georgetown University.

A talk by Dr Cóilíne Parsons, Georgetown University.

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), a South African novelist, anti-war campaigner, and women’s rights activist, came early to the study of the thing we call progress. As a teenager, she was given a copy of Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862), and it came to dominate her thoughts in early years, influencing not only her freethinking regarding religion, but also her philosophy of history and the progress of humankind.

This talk will investigate some astronomical aspects of the basis of Spencer’s First Principles, steeped as it was in a contested and religiously inflected theory of the origins of planets and stars. It will ask how Schreiner’s lifelong attention to the Southern African sky in her novels functioned as a place of questioning and critique, from a colonial standpoint, of one of the foundational theories of progress in the nineteenth century. Spencer’s ideas, Schreiner found, had no place at the edges of empire.

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Cóilín Parsons is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, where he also directs the Global Irish Studies Initiative. He is the author of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature (2016) and co-editor of Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa (2015), as well as Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (2019).

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Graham Ward. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson’s Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.

Michael Scott (moderator) is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously was the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk