“Literature in the Bush”: Samuel Butler, Style, and Settler Colonialism

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.