A critical study of Olive Schreiner's fiction in a historical and biographical context.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1985.Olive Schreiner's fiction is best understood in the context of her colonial situation : she experienced central Victorian spiritual dilemmas and social constrictions, but refracted through a rural colonial culture. A complex position of power and powerlessness, superiority and inferiority, individual assertiveness and self- abnegation, is the crux of her fictional world. Her formative years were spent within a culturally deprived rural environment in a dependent position as servant/governess, yet her reading gave her access to leading Victorian intellectuals who were trying to create a new synthesis out of the conflict between Darwin's revolutionary theory and faith in a God-given and unquestionable order, between science and faith, between a new spirit of 'realistic' enquiry and Christian dogma. The problem for the colonial novelist is similar to that of the provincial novelist : the writer seeking intellectual stimulus and cultural enrichment at the metropolitan centre often has to forego a sense of community, and a youthful emotional bond with a nourishing, indigenous landscape, frequently the original source of a sense of spiritual harmony and an underlying order in the universe itself. The colonial novelist thus expresses a tragic breach between individual and community, and a sense of irreconcilable needs. This process is best exemplified in the careers of women, because the difficulty in finding a suitable partner, and a fulfilling marriage, exemplifies the radical problem of reconciling nature and nurture, instinct and social convention. Solitariness, and death, can become the conditions of integrity. Nevertheless, Schreiner's analysis of social problems becomes more detailed and incisive as she develops, and social reform offers a way out of a doomed conflict. Schreiner's childhood reading of the Bible and her evangelical inheritance were crucial to her life and fiction. In both a spirit of charity and self-sacrifice was central, and contended with a popular Victorian view of Darwinism which saw nature as a struggle for survival, a competition between the 'fittest' in which power would be decisive. Schreiner's visionary optimism about moral and social progress was checked by a sense of natural cruelty, historical repetition and decadence, and the early influence of the doctrine of 'original sin'. Schreiner saw her fiction as having a social mission, but the mission could only be accomplished by a novelist true to her individual vision, and expressing her 'self' by aesthetic means. A novel should grow 'organically' from the artist's individual vision, and thus be analogous to a living and unfolding natural world, developing according to its awn inherent laws. Schreiner understood Art and Nature as complementary orders. Her theory of art is thorough and internally consistent : writing should be simple, sensuous, and passionate, and should reconcile social function and artistic design. The power and directness of colonial art reunited her with the Victorian metropolitan centre, though she experienced Victorian social issues in a particular, intensified form in South Africa. Nevertheless, her reponse to South African landscapes, her sense of its 'will to live' at the same time stimulated her own power of creativity, which would counter the stultifying effects of rural isolation and the social restraints on, and exploitation of uneducated women. Schreiner's spirit of militancy and a reliance on the individual conscience stemmed from her evangelical forebears, though she translated their religious non-conformism into social protest in the South African context. Her family was part of the missionary wing of Imperialism and at the same time part of the current of liberalism and enlightenment which clashed with a conservative slave-owning society in South Africa. Her own fiction expresses the plight of the 'slave' in a sequence of metaphorical transformations. The figures of the child, the young women, the servant, the convict, the slave, the prostitute, the black man and the black women interrelate and modify a simple portrait of victimization. Her fiction also draws on the homiletic tradition of evangelical literature,which used deathbed scenes as the carriers of a moral message. Schreiner's writing displays a characteristically Victorian range of non-fiction and fiction, pamphlets, letters, diaries satires, dream-visions, autobiographical fragments, and ambitious full-Iength novels. Her writing displays the Victorian concern with autobiographical and confessional literature as well as direct political and social intervention in a corrupt society. She shaped her life more and more consciously into a variety of narrative forms, from erotic fantasies and escapist to more outwardly-directed satirical and reformist fiction. Her early experience of homelessness economic and social dependence on strangers, as well as sexual vulnerability to men, was crucial in her formative experience. But here, too, she overcame a tendency toward masochism and narcissistic self-reflection to portray a women whose survival and growth expressed the strong side of Schreiner's vigorous and mature feminism. Schreiner's fictions, from the fragment "Diamond Fields" and the youthful Undine, to the early 'masterpiece' The Story of an African Farm, to the political satire Trooper Peter Halket and the encyclopedic though unfinished From Man to Man, display great narrative fertility, and an ability to modify and develop her own characteristic themes, images, and characters. An early multiplication of female victims gave way to the rich oppositions and multiple different-sex protagonists of African Farm, and the concentration yet divergence of the double-female protagonist situation of From Man to Man. All of her fictions move along a spectrum from protest to vision, realism to dream/allegory, and she inverts - and adapts the proportions in accordance with the aims of each particular work. Her fiction shows variety, creative richness, yet a growing economy of means and artistic control of genre. Her development as a novelist was away from a narcissitic focus on the self as victim towards a commitment to suffering forms of life outside the self. She also displayed a growing commitment to the social analysis of human suffering, and to South Africa as the crucible in which she had been formed, as a landscape which offered her an image of harmony to set against social malfunction, and as the strongest source of her own creativity

Infection rates associated with epidural indwelling catheters for seven days or longer: systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: To determine infection rate with use of epidural catheters in place for seven days or more. METHODS: Systematic review and pooled analysis of observational studies. RESULTS: Twelve studies with 4,628 patients (median 197 patients) provided information, of which nine (4,334 patients) were published after 1990. Eight studies (3,893 patients) were retrospective, and four studies (735 patients) prospective. Electronic searches identified three studies and searching reference lists nine. There were 257 catheter-related infections in total, of which 211 were superficial and 57 deep, giving rates of 6.1%, 4.6% and 1.2% respectively. Ten of the 12 studies had deep infection rates of 2% or less. The incidence of deep infection was 1 per 2391 days of treatment, or 0.4 per 1000 catheter treatment days. In nine studies (1503 patients), predominantly in cancer, and with average catheter duration of 74 days, the deep infection rate was 2.8%. The proportion of patients with infection of any type was higher in cancer patients with longer catheter duration. Limited numbers of events meant that no reliable estimate of the impact of prospective and retrospective design could be made. There appeared to be a relationship between catheter duration and infection rate from this and other recent estimates. Four of 57 (7%) patients with deep infection died. CONCLUSION: The best estimate is that one person in 35 with an epidural catheter in place for 74 days for relief of cancer pain can be expected to have a deep epidural infection, and that about 1 in 500 may die of infection-related causes. This is a most uncertain estimate given the limited nature of the evidence

Dephosphorylated NSSR1 Is Induced by Androgen in Mouse Epididymis and Phosphorylated NSSR1 Is Increased during Sperm Maturation

NSSR1 (Neural salient serine/arginine rich protein 1, alternatively SRp38) is a newly identified RNA splicing factor and predominantly expressed in neural tissues. Here, by Western blot analysis and immunofluorescent staining, we showed that the expression of dephosphorylated NSSR1 increased significantly during development of the caput epididymis. In adult mice, phosphorylated NSSR1 was mainly expressed in the apical side of epithelial cells, and dephosphorylated NSSR1 in caput epididymis was upregulated in a testosterone dependent manner. In addition, subcellular immunoreactive distribution of NSSR1 varied in different regions of the epididymis. With respect to the sperm, phosphorylated NSSR1 was detected in the mid-piece of the tail as well as the acrosome. Furthermore, NSSR1 was released from the sperm head during the capacitation and acrosome reaction. These findings for the first time provide the evidence for the potential roles of NSSR1 in sperm maturation and fertilization

Tetraploid Wheat Landraces in the Mediterranean Basin: Taxonomy, Evolution and Genetic Diversity

The geographic distribution of genetic diversity and the population structure of tetraploid wheat landraces in the Mediterranean basin has received relatively little attention. This is complicated by the lack of consensus concerning the taxonomy of tetraploid wheats and by unresolved questions regarding the domestication and spread of naked wheats. These knowledge gaps hinder crop diversity conservation efforts and plant breeding programmes. We investigated genetic diversity and population structure in tetraploid wheats (wild emmer, emmer, rivet and durum) using nuclear and chloroplast simple sequence repeats, functional variations and insertion site-based polymorphisms. Emmer and wild emmer constitute a genetically distinct population from durum and rivet, the latter seeming to share a common gene pool. Our population structure and genetic diversity data suggest a dynamic history of introduction and extinction of genotypes in the Mediterranean fields

Innate lymphocyte cells in asthma phenotypes

T helper type 2 (TH2) cells were previously thought to be the main initiating effector cell type in asthma; however, exaggerated TH2 cell activities alone were insufficient to explain all aspects of asthma. Asthma is a heterogeneous syndrome comprising different phenotypes that are characterized by their different clinical features, treatment responses, and inflammation patterns. The most-studied subgroups of asthma include TH2-associated early-onset allergic asthma, late-onset persistent eosinophilic asthma, virus-induced asthma, obesity-related asthma, and neutrophilic asthma. The recent discovery of human innate lymphoid cells capable of rapidly producing large amounts of cytokines upon activation and the mouse data pointing to an essential role for these cells in asthma models have emphasized the important role of the innate immune system in asthma and have provided a new means of better understanding asthma mechanisms and differentiating its phenotypes