“One of these curiously compounded works criticism stops at”: New Zealand’s First Novel and the Problems of Acclimatisation

Abstract

This paper discusses New Zealand’s first novel Taranaki: A Tale of the War by Henry Butler Stoney, written in 1861, and ignored or dismissed by critics colonial, nationalist and postcolonial. Using the metaphor of acclimatisation, a popular endeavour in the nineteenth century, the paper considers the ways in which the introduced and alien novel form adapted or failed to adapt to the new context. The fictional status of Taranaki is supplemented by the author’s recourse to factual sources, and the fictional romance mode, such as that found in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, is used to effect at least a textual resolution of the unresolved and fractious war, albeit a resolution that excludes any consideration of Maori as actors or characters.