Literature in the Bush

This essay considers the relationship between settler colonialism and style in the work of Samuel Butler. Butler became an important influence on Anglophone modernism primarily through his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903). I argue that this text's innovations were rooted in Butler's time as a sheep farmer in New Zealand from 1859-64. Placing Butler in a theoretical tradition that insists on style's essential tie to authorial personhood, I show how Butler's "plain style" prose encodes a new, radically minimal conception of what it means to be a person-one profoundly shaped by the tensions of the settler experience

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Literature · Style (visual arts) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies