William Henry Hudson, Hybridity, and Storytelling in the Pampas

This article argues that William Henry Hudson’s novel The Purple Land figures Anglo-Argentine contact in the age of informal empire as constituted through narrative storytelling. Narrative structures encounters among people on local and global levels, and Hudson shows that narrative is simultaneously the most natural conduit and the most stubborn barrier to transnational hybridity on both personal and national scales. This argument locates Hudson, therefore, in the convergence between global exchange, in the specific form of British capital that precipitated Argentine dependence in the world system, and local interpersonal exchange as a site of narrative and nationalist self-fashioning.