THE STORY OF CANTERBURY. By A. H. Reed

McCaskill, Murray

doi:10.1111/j.1745-7939.1950.tb01729.x

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“…The Esk Valley flood spurred the creation of a government-commissioned committee of inquiry into questions of soil deterioration, which in turn led to the passage of the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act (1941), described by one geographer (McCaskill, 1973: 27) as “the most important date in the history of land use in New Zealand”. It was also upon such eroded terrain, therefore, that New Zealand literature took a new shape between the 1930s and 1950s.…”

Section: “When Anarchy Breaks Loose In Nature”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s

Steer

2021

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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The Pākehā (settler) writing that flourished in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century is often seen as an attempt to ground settler culture in the precolonial earth. Produced at a time when erosion was seen as a pressing national and global environmental crisis, however, this essay argues New Zealand literary culture in fact was suffused with awareness of settlement’s profoundly damaged landscape. Returning to prominent critical statements, prose, and poetry from this period — notably by Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Monte Holcroft, and Frank Sargeson — reveals that imagery of erosion was central to imagining the nature and impact of settlement in geological terms. In contrast to the antagonistic relationship with nature plotted in these texts, writers such as Ursula Bethell and Herbert Guthrie-Smith offered alternative possibilities for environmental thought through models of geological understanding that drew on religious vocabularies and Māori thought. At the broadest level, focusing on settler literature produced in a moment of environmental crisis framed in geological terms has the potential to illuminate critical responses to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

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Section: “When Anarchy Breaks Loose In Nature”mentioning

confidence: 99%

The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s

Steer

2021

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

THE STORY OF CANTERBURY. By A. H. Reed

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s

The culture of erosion: Settler colonialism, geological agency, and New Zealand literature, 1930s–1950s

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