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Frontier Fictions

Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt

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  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

    1. North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

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  • Examines a wide range of contexts, including South Africa, Australia, Canada and the US

  • Refers to situations from the nineteenth century to the present

  • Makes a timely intervention into world and postcolonial studies

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xl
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  2. The Settler Saga

    • Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
    Pages 1-40

  3. Guilt and the Settler–Indigene Relationship

    • Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
    Pages 41-80

  4. Guiltscapes of the Homestead, Village, and Fort

    • Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
    Pages 81-115

  5. Settler Guilt and Animal Allegories

    • Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
    Pages 117-156

  6. The Lost Settler Child

    • Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
    Pages 157-197

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 199-247
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Keywords

About this book

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.

Reviews

“Frontier Fictions is a timely book: accessing an archive that was never previously the subject of comparative and transnational scrutiny, it focuses on moments of ambivalence in Anglophone settler literatures. It compellingly highlights a number of recurring tropes and a suite of defensive mechanisms that accompany a particular psychological state: that of the settler. Frontier Fictions demonstrates that first generation settlers globally used the novel as a crucial site for the elaboration and displacement of guilt. Focusing on settler collective and personal guilt and on the multiple ways in which it is managed, this book contributes significantly to the analysis of global settlement processes.” (Lorenzo Veracini, Associate Professor in History at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia)


Authors and Affiliations

  • North Dakota State University, Fargo, USA

    Rebecca Weaver-Hightower

About the author

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is Professor of English at North Dakota State University, USA. Her publications include Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest (2007), Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance with Peter Hulme (2014), and Archiving Settlement: Culture, Space and Race with Yuting Huang (2018). She works with postcolonial literature and film.

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