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'This essay considers three novels which each bear the word ‘pioneer’ in their titles: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Pioneers (1915). The three novels, although moving widely across time and space, are taken as representative of the creative literature of settler colonialism. A model of reading settler colonial literature is advanced that draws on four distinct features found across the three novels. These are: a tendency to spatialise the historical time of settler colonialism within the geography of the novel; the condensation of settler legal anxiety into a legal drama in the text; the application of a generational structure to Indigenise the settler; and the recurrence in the text of a ‘primal scene’ by which the settler society remembers its foundational violence in repressed form.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 7 Dec 2016 12:23:33
https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/cooper-cather-prichard-pioneer-the-chronotope-of-settler-colonialism
Cooper, Cather, Prichard, 'Pioneer' : The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism
Australian Literary Studies
Subjects:
- The Pioneers 1915 single work novel
- Writing the Colonial Adventure : Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 1995 single work criticism
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