Augustus Earle’s Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand

This chapter outlines a model for re-reading European-authored travel texts of the nineteenth century (and potentially travel writing more generally) that aims to move beyond an approach to their aesthetics shaped by moments of arrival and meeting, and prospect views. It takes a mobilities studies approach and focuses on the example of the ‘pedestrian tour’ in Augustus Earle’s Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand, in 1827 (1832). The chapter asks what different understandings of history and coeval ‘life worlds’ might emerge when we pay attention to mundane, local, and embodied movements within texts such as Earle’s – movements of both the European traveller(s) in the text and of Indigenous peoples, in this case Māori. It pays particular attention to what happens when we read mobility within prose travel texts alongside – and to an extent against – the more dominant worldings evoked by the visual art of pre-colonial and early colonial periods.

Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526152893.00013

Online Publication Date: 06 Jul 2021