ENGLISH 758 T O P I C S I N R HE TO RIC , W R IT I N G A N D C U LT UR E

NDSU Department of English

2011 Summer Scholar

presents

Frontier Fictions
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is an Associate Professor of
English specializing in postcolonial studies at the University of
North Dakota. Her book Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and
Fantasies of Conquest (Minnesota 2007), analyzes how island
castaway tales presented fantasies that made the expansion of
empire more palatable. She is currently co-editing a volume on
postcolonial film and another journal special issue on Australian
literature. Weaver-Hightower enjoys traveling internationally
(most often to South Africa, Australia, and England) to work
3-18 with dusty old books in archives and learn about the cultures of
J U N E 1, D A I L Y
PM the places about which she reads and writes.
9AM-4 0-25
J U N E 2 VARIES
DULE
SCHE This course offers frontier fiction of the
ON
SC RI PTI
E DE US alongside similar tales from
C OURS
Australia, South Africa, and Canada in order to
C OU R S E R E A D I N GS investigate why these stories are important to these national
mythologies. Over the course of the semester, tales about soldiers and
William Gilmore Sims’ The forts, women fighting to maintain home and family, immigrants
Yemassee: A Romance of Carolinas struggling to make a life, and settlers encountering “native” peoples will
(1835) (American) be paired with criticism introducing theories and ideas useful for better
understanding the frontier.
Catherine Parr Traill’s The
Backwoods of Canada (1836)
(Canadian)

John Robinson’s George Linton:

Or The First Years Of An English
Colony (1876) (South African)

Henry Kingsley’s, The

HUT AT F OR T
Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn A ES
ON N ATIV
Vol 2 (1860) (Australian) TT ACK
I VE A
NAT