« Parking settlers: Laura McKinley, ‘Commemorating Contested National Park Landscapes: The Canada 150 Discovery Pass and White Scopic Disremembering’, in Lourdes López-Ropero, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds), Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes, Springer, 2025, pp. 55-72
The rhetoric of settler colonialism: Joshua Smith, ‘Transforming Relationships: Land, Colonialism, and Rhetorical Sedimentation’, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 28, 2, 2025, pp. 158-180 »

The style of settler colonialism: Mark Taylor, ‘”Literature in the Bush”: Samuel Butler, Style, and Settler Colonialism’, New Literary History, 56, 1, 2025, pp. 159-183

26Jul25

Abstract: 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.


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