The Made Man and the “Minor” Novel: Erewhon, ANT, and Empire

Abstract

Bruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self-proclaimed “minor” novel, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer.