South African literature of the first literary works of note is Olive Schreiner's 1883 "The Story of an African Farm", which can be linked to Van den Heever's "Laat Vrugte" as a "plaasroman". The novel was a revelation in Victorian literature: it is heralded by many as introducing feminism into the novel form. However, Mossman (1990: 41) argues that "The most frequently taught work of South African literature in American classrooms is "Cry, the Beloved Country" (1948) by Alan Paton". A possible reason for this is that it was made into a film starring James Earl Jones, and it depicts a typical racist
The Cry and the Covenant street telling women to demand of their doctors that they wash their hands, and otherwise behaving so erratically that he is committed to an insane asylum, where because of a cut finger he contracts and dies of the very disease he spent his life fighting. A legacy of Semmelweis, highlighted in "The Cry and the Covenant", is that hand washing, to this day, remains the most effective method of preventing the spread of infection. The Cry and the Covenant The Cry and the Covenant is a novel by Morton Thompson written in 1949 and published by Doubleday. The novel is