The Ocular Paradigm of Frontier Fiction

The Ocular Paradigm of Frontier Fiction: Visual Subjectivities of the Early New Zealand
Novel introduces nineteenth-century novels of New Zealand into a discourse of new
settlement fictional narratives. The novels chosen from the Nineteenth-century (NZETC)
novels collection draw upon contemporary art theory in particular the recent works of
American art theorist Caroline Jones whose Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology
and Art (2006) and Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the
Bureaucratisation of the Senses (2005) provides a useful theoretical background in art,
consumer society and material culture with which to consider visual perspectives as
identity and cultural symbolism in early New Zealand fiction. The Ocular Paradigm is
investigative of the early New Zealand novel's relationship to a colonisation of the senses
as a literary product of Victorian diaspora directly related to an idea of sight as the ocular
sense. As a sensory field discussion relative to the processes of colonisation The Ocular
Paradigm is primarily concerned with settlement contexts of early New Zealand fiction
which as a settler-colonial perspective are persuasive of unsettled or virtual settler
experience. This attempt at an interdisciplinary discourse of art language and fiction aims
to situate a critical perspective of sight as a constitutively-based dichotomous relationship
between settler and environment.