This essay seeks to supplement an established critical tradition that reads natural history in Neo-Victorian fiction from a post-modern and largely de-politicised perspective. I argue that the figure of the naturalist can be used to revisit natural history’s complicity with imperial expansion, both in its practice and in its discursive framework. By means of a close reading of Jem Poster’s Rifling Paradise (2006), I explore the ways in which natural history gives way to an ecological approach to the colonial landscape, pointing to a possible – though still problematic – alternative to a scientific (exploitative, colonial) understanding of the relationship between nature and human beings.
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