Settler literary regionalism and the conquest of deep time: Michael Boyden, ‘Deep Time and Settler Literary Regionalism in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!’, American Literary Realism, 57, 2 2025, pp. 118-130 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler literary regionalism and the conquest of deep time: Michael Boyden, ‘Deep Time and Settler Literary Regionalism in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!’, American Literary Realism, 57, 2 2025, pp. 118-130

26Nov24

Excerpt: The emergence of literary regionalism toward the final quarter of the nineteenth century was largely coterminous with the discovery of what we now call deep time. It might seem ironic that just as theories of evolution started to situate human history within larger temporal scales, the literary imagination appeared to contract, both temporally and spatially, by thematizing small-scale communities seemingly unaffected by the passing of time. However, regional fiction did register the time revolution brought on by new scientific findings. As I argue in this article, it did so specifically in settler colonial situations where an awareness of deep time served to negotiate the complicated dynamic of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion that characterizes such a system of domination. The discovery of deep time in literary regionalism thus should be linked to a specific representational regime predicated on the synchronous erasure and appropriation of Indigenous alterities in settler contexts. This representational regime, I suggest, relied on a discourse of primitivism that allowed it to reconcile the conflicting tendencies of the settler colonial situation.

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