Settler Literature and Environmental Change in Colonial New Zealand and Australia (2020-22)
Marsden Fund Standard Grant (NZ$657,000), Marsden Fund Council and Royal Society Te Apārangi
Co-Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Teresa Shewry (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Associate Investigator: Associate Professor Margaret Forster (Massey University)
Colonisation transformed the environments of Australia and New Zealand at unprecedented scale and speed, and these changes profoundly impacted the settler cultures that emerged there during the nineteenth century. Settler literature's environmental themes have generally been treated as a backdrop to questions of national identity and belonging, but that body of writing also has the potential to offer unique insights into the human dimensions of environmental change. The aim of this project is to reassess settler poems, novels, and travel narratives as a form of environmental knowledge that allowed colonial society to define the limits of its responsibility to the natural world. We will produce a new account of colonial culture in Australia and New Zealand, by locating its texts within the context of specific ecosystems and environmental debates, and tracing how their environmental claims intersected with Indigenous ecological knowledge and with developments in colonial science. By adopting this interdisciplinary and transnational approach, the project will throw light on the role of settler literature in producing the changed environments we now inhabit. It will also further our understanding of the social dimensions of complex environmental challenges in the present moment.
Co-Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Teresa Shewry (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Associate Investigator: Associate Professor Margaret Forster (Massey University)
Colonisation transformed the environments of Australia and New Zealand at unprecedented scale and speed, and these changes profoundly impacted the settler cultures that emerged there during the nineteenth century. Settler literature's environmental themes have generally been treated as a backdrop to questions of national identity and belonging, but that body of writing also has the potential to offer unique insights into the human dimensions of environmental change. The aim of this project is to reassess settler poems, novels, and travel narratives as a form of environmental knowledge that allowed colonial society to define the limits of its responsibility to the natural world. We will produce a new account of colonial culture in Australia and New Zealand, by locating its texts within the context of specific ecosystems and environmental debates, and tracing how their environmental claims intersected with Indigenous ecological knowledge and with developments in colonial science. By adopting this interdisciplinary and transnational approach, the project will throw light on the role of settler literature in producing the changed environments we now inhabit. It will also further our understanding of the social dimensions of complex environmental challenges in the present moment.
The Reid family outside their slab hut home, Whangamomona. James McAllister, ca. 1898-99.
Realism, Romance, and the Settler Colonies: Literary Form, Territoriality and Political Economy, 1829-1915 (2012-14)
Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant (NZ$345,000), Marsden Fund Council and Royal Society Te Apārangi
This project revises our understanding of colonial New Zealand literature, contending that it should be seen as inherently trans-national rather than merely pre-national. Victorian-era writers in New Zealand, Australia and Britain produced a global literature united by the circulation of genres, and I will argue that realism and romance in particular provided them with critical tools for testing the concepts of political economy and territoriality that underpinned this evolving Greater Britain. My research instils New Zealand literature with a new global relevance, positioning the settler colony as key to understanding fundamental aspects of Victorian Britain’s imperial literature and culture.
This project revises our understanding of colonial New Zealand literature, contending that it should be seen as inherently trans-national rather than merely pre-national. Victorian-era writers in New Zealand, Australia and Britain produced a global literature united by the circulation of genres, and I will argue that realism and romance in particular provided them with critical tools for testing the concepts of political economy and territoriality that underpinned this evolving Greater Britain. My research instils New Zealand literature with a new global relevance, positioning the settler colony as key to understanding fundamental aspects of Victorian Britain’s imperial literature and culture.