The Colonial Bildungsroman: The­ Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe

This essay examines the plot structure, characterization, and figurative language of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, suggesting that the novel's assimilation of an uneven and markedly colonial temporality unsettles the inherited formal dictates of the Goethean bildungsroman. Like other late-Victorian and modernist works set in the colonial contact zone and fixated on youthful protagonists who do not or cannot mature (including works by Kipling, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, and Rhys), African Farm invokes yet breaks the bildungsroman's genetic code of progressive temporality. It thus literalizes the basic political and economic fact of imperial time: the colonies do not—in a strict sense cannot—come of age under the rule of empire.