Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology

Abstract

Although an outspoken freethinker, Olive Schreiner engaged frequently and creatively with religious texts and traditions throughout her writings. Her religious revisionism informs Dreams (1890), a collection of short narratives that influenced many subsequent women’s rights activists but has since fallen into relative critical neglect. Responding to developments in postsecular scholarship, this article re-reads Schreiner’s stories as advancing a literary theology of immanence. Her various and fragmentary revelations adapt inherited models of spiritual autobiography and refashion biblical imagery, experimenting with religious allegory to challenge religious exclusivism. These innovations reflect her participation in several intersecting developments within early feminist movements that sought not only to overturn patriarchal expressions of religion but also to reclaim women’s spiritual authority and imagine new pathways to divinity. Rather than advancing a linear model of spiritual development, Dreams reflects an eclectic, open-ended process of searching that refashions religious symbols even as it ventures beyond canonical and institutional boundaries. This work, in turn, invites a critical reassessment of Schreiner’s freethinking output not as a rejection of religion but as an effort to rewrite it.