Settlers fantasise about gardens: Nicholas Enright, Plant and Settler: Eighteenth Cnetury Fictions of Eurpean Colonisation (Defoe, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Kleist), PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers fantasise about gardens: Nicholas Enright, Plant and Settler: Eighteenth Cnetury Fictions of Eurpean Colonisation (Defoe, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Kleist), PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2022

23Dec22

Excerpt: This thesis shall investigate the problematics of settler colonialism through the prism of three key literary fictions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 1780) and Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Betrothal in St. Domingo, 1811) – texts in which the fantasy of planting and settling, so I argue, is at its most productive and virulent. Connecting these fictions is not only their enormous popularity or the wellknown fact that they all cite, revise and rewrite each other. Equally unifying is the way in which each of them combines a dynamic of gardening with the setting of a far-away island at a remove from European society. Islands, like gardens, are small, unassuming spaces in which social, economic and
power-political relationships have always been hotly contested and negotiated. In their assumed manageability and self-sufficiency, they are consistently appropriated for all kinds of ideological agendas and utopian …

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