Enlightenment and mission in early nineteenth century South Africa

In the early 19th century the London Missionary Society’s activities in South Africa were the subject of great scandal and a source of disrepute. The behaviour and attitudes of the first wave of LMS missionaries had challenged, and caused outrage, to both the political and moral norms of the colony. The radical attitudes and unconventional private lives of many of the early missionaries had also clearly shocked the Directors in Europe. In these controversies, and in the manner that the Society dealt with them, there can be read a contestation about not only the character, but also the purpose of mission activity. Was the Missionary task to work for political stability, to spread European values and help prepare a compliant and educated workforce? Or was it to save ‘lost souls’ and turn people away from idolatry and sin? Or, again, was it to fight for the oppressed, to liberate slaves and oppose tyranny? These debates were framed in complex and contradictory ways by a larger discussion that was informed by the new ideas and agendas that had emerged in the 18th century, commonly referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’. This paper traces the contours of an engagement between ‘Evangelical’ values and ‘Enlightenment’ principles through an exploration of the issues of the day such as: abolitionism, women’s rights, civilization and savagery. [From the Author]

Astonishing apples: visualising the novel

This paper explores the developing relationship between fictional and visual representations. The impact of visual art on the novel as mimetic is an issue that writers have engaged with and written about from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, often raising the question of the art/life dialectic and how it has evolved through the novel’s exploration of ideas. From painting, photography, cinema, television and newer digital visual cultures writers have sought to involve themselves in a critical examination of the impact of changes in these forms on other art form and on wider society. How do these visual forms affect what it means to be an artist, a writer, a human being? The paper takes the work of Paul Cezanne as a starting point in the history of representation. Writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other artists like Picasso, have been influenced by, or responded to, Cezanne’s work and to Cezanne’s writings on art and his letters to his great childhood friend, the novelist Emile Zola. By discussing the creative practice of writing a novel this paper will examine questions of how the novel can, and should, respond to the impact of visual culture’s seeming dominance over other art forms. It also explores what impact new forms of visual culture have had upon the mimetic and formal aspects of the novel and how the novel works as representational, especially in relation to representations of human consciousness. [From the Author]