Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

The Meaning Of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers In The Postcolonial Historical Novel, Hamish Dalley

Articles & Book Chapters

Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to …