Forms of Settlement: Colonial Space, Time and Genre from Adventure in New Zealand to the Fossil Pits‪.‬

New Zealand's colonial literature is characterised by its blurring of generic boundaries, which critics have typically regarded as a sign of cultural lack and immaturity. Joan Stevens' description of the 'first New Zealand novels' emphasises their 'uneasy marriage of fact and fiction', while more recently Lawrence Jones has cast them as 'very much a mixed bag, with no continuity of development') This 'mixed' writing, viewed for so long as a kind of literary state of nature awaiting the civilising intervention of critical realism, has begun to be rehabilitated over the last decade or so along two broadly different lines. The first of these, exemplified by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams' Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872-1914 (2006), is essentially a project of literary-historical recovery, repositioning the writing of the Maoriland period as the 'first generation of cultural nationalism in New Zealand'. (2) By contrast, the project of settlement studies advanced by Alex Calder and Stephen Turner takes a more theoretical approach, arguing that the originary moment of settlement is encoded in the experience of living in the present day. 'Our goal', they maintain, 'has been to investigate the ways in which foundational problems of settlement are enacted, repeated, modified and continued in literature, art, and other cultural forms'. (3) These divergent approaches are united however by a common focus on the cultural sphere and questions of identity, and a concomitant prioritising of theme and content. In contrast to these thematic-culturalist approaches, in this essay I wish to take a different route by making the case that the role of genre in colonial writing affords insights into the political order of the settlement project and the nation it gave rise to. (4) The rationale for such an approach can be demonstrated by brief reference to a touchstone text of colonial literary studies, F. E. Maning's Old New Zealand (1863). From its opening lines, Maning's text is self-consciously structured around a tension between Old and New New Zealand: