ENGLISH 758 T O P I C S I N R H ETO R I C A ND W R I T I N G

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. Her current work analyzes Australian, South Afri-
can, Canadian and U.S. frontier literatures for how certain stories helped those
cultures to process the guilt from the displacement of indigenous peoples dur-
ing colonial settlement. She is also currently co-editing a volume on postcolo-
nial film and another journal special issue on Australian literature. Weaver-
Hightower enjoys traveling internationally (most often to South Africa, Austra-
lia, and England) to work with dusty old books in archives and learn about the
cultures of the places about which she reads and writes and she is Book Re-
views editor of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
-18
J U N E 1 3D A I L Y
M, This course offers frontier fiction of the US alongside similar tales from Austra-
9AM-4P
-25 lia, South Africa, and Canada in order to investigate why these stories are im-
J U N E 2 0V A R I E S portant to these national mythologies and what these novels can tell us about
C H E D ULE
S the time in which they were set, the time in which they were written (generally
a generation later), and where we have gone since then. Over the course of the
semester, we’ll read tales about soldiers and forts, women fighting to maintain
home and family, immigrants struggling to make a life, and settlers encounter-
C OU R S E R E A D I N GS ing “native” peoples of Africa, Australia and North America. We will pair
these primary texts with criticism introducing theories and ideas useful for bet-
William Gilmore Sims’ The Yemassee: A ter understanding the frontier, like “the contact zone,” the captivity narrative,
Romance of Carolinas (1835) the lost child motif, the “vanishing Indian,” representations of landscape and
(American) ecology, and depictions of animals as real and symbolic.

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 Recollections of

Geoffry Hamlyn Vol 2 (1860)
(Australian) HUT F OR T
A AT
ON ES
ACK N ATIV
ATT
IVE
NAT