This chapter begins with an introduction to the allegorical paradigms of Southern African modernism as a politicised aesthetic technique that was not only grounded in the work of Schreiner, but also constituted the dominant form of writing by black authors of the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The afterlives of Oliver Schreiner's politics and aesthetics are interpreted across networks of textual and personal relationships as a way of animating African modernism in historical, literary and non-literary contexts. This is despite the fact that Nicholas Brown, in his highly influential reading of modernism and African literature of decolonisation, warns against mapping 'empirical or genetic literary history', recommending that analysis should instead be based on 'each text's relationship to history itself'. Whilst many of the writers or works discussed in this chapter have been analysed in relation to modernism, this is …

The "family" is usually assumed to be a stable term; indeed, contemporary political rhetorics would have it to be the "bedrock" of society; references to "hard-working families" abound, and are therefore, of course, reduced to the level of cliché. The so-called "originating text" of gothic fiction was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. The Gothic is absorbed, through and through, with the family: with its habits, with its disruptions, with its development. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, of course, have developed Freud's ideas in further directions: toward, for example, the crypt, the place where the secrets of the family might be held, but forever sealed. To return to that arch-nationalist, Dracula: his sense of family is both overt and hidden. He is, in one sense, the acme of a good family man, while on the other he represents arrant individualism.

Failed emigration still is an unsettling subject. It has hitherto received only scant attention in historical research or literary studies and likewise continues to be sidestepped in contemporary discourses. Yet a close look at its significance in the literature of a time period that saw unprecedented mass movement enables us to realize new connections both across the globe and across literary texts – connections between fictional and non-fictional texts, canonical and non-canonical works, metropolitan and settler writing; anxieties about unsettlement and formal innovation, reluctance and narrative delay, clichéd spaces and aesthetic rewritings; and also the different methodologies of emigration history, diasporic studies, and literary analysis. I have found Victorian representations of the failure to settle down – whether in a new place or back at home – a fascinating subject both because they make us reconsider our own …