The Activist Novel
Pastoral Political Mediations in England and Aotearoa New Zealand
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21366110 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Helen Small (0000-0002-9362-8141, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 141-166 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | NOVEL A Forum on Fiction (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0029-5132 • E-ISSN: 1945-8509 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00295132-12182202 |
| OpenAlex | W7116832613 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 12 |
This essay examines forms of social and political activism in England and Aotearoa New Zealand as they are mediated through disruptions of pastoral in Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain (1856). Three counterposed strains of political action are connected by the narrative workings of the family bildungsroman: a spontaneous protest by grammar school boys defending ancient “British” liberties; organized social endeavors by English girls, bringing basic education to the poor; and—on the other side of the globe—anti-imperial acts of resistance by Māori warriors amid a longer context of intertribal disputes. Rethinking an Empsonian critical model associating pastoral with artistic political simplification, the essay offers a “peep” at the complex “machinery” of high-Victorian didactic and imperial pastoral constrained to realism by the dialogic operation of the novel. In doing so, it shows how the term political activism may be opened up to historical and critical complication by the workings of novelistic form
Aotearoa · Context (archaeology) · Dialogic · Narrative · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Australian History and Society · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · New Zealand Economic and Social Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|