The Ocular Paradigm of Frontier Fiction: Visual Subjectives of the Early New Zealand Novel investigates the early New Zealand novel as a literary product of Victorian diaspora and colonisation of the senses to create for the first time an interdisciplinary discourse of art language and fiction. The novels chosen from the Nineteenth-century Electronic Text Collection (NZETC) draw upon contemporary art and consumer theory in particular American art theorist Caroline Jones Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Art (2006) and Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratisation of the Senses (2005). As a critique of nineteenth-century social diaspora The Ocular Paradigm focalises upon colonial New Zealand's pre-modern but rapidly industrialising society whose determining influences of British imperialism or Victorian diaspora find their political ethos and challenges in the visionary social manifesto outlined in Edward Gibbon Wakefield' work A view of the art of colonisation (1849).