This book revises the periods, places, and topics usually associated with anti-colonialism and aesthetic experimentation in African literature, visiting Olive Schreiner as a theorist and practitioner of modernist form advancing towards an emergent postcolonialism. A theoretical concept of the role of primitivism and allegory within the context of modernism and associated critical theory is proposed through the integration of postcolonial, Marxist, and ecocritical approaches to literature, contextualised among other Southern African authors. This book joins modernist studies, ecocriticism, primitivism, and postcolonial studies and contributes to debates surrounding gender, race, and empire.