The Long Forgetting: Post-colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand Patrick Evans Canterbury University Press, $34.50, ISBN 9781877257698 Approximately halfway through Patrick Evans’ study comes a paragraph that, upon reflection, more or less sums up the way the book works. The…
Making Ends Meet: Essays and Talks 1992-2004 Ian Wedde Victoria University Press, $39.95, ISBN 086473503 In the title essay of this wonderful collection, originally given as a talk on issues of research and archiving at the National Library of New…
Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945 Lawrence Jones Victoria University Press, $49.94, ISBN 0864734557 Nationalism, and especially cultural nationalism, inhabits a position in contemporary culture that seems peculiarly complex. Easy to identify, yet…
Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews Bill Manhire Victoria University Press, $34.95, ISBN 0 86473 370 4 The Canadian poet Douglas Barbour once wrote that Bill Manhire’s poetry displays a “duplicitous unwillingness to guarantee anything”, a feature he felt to be…
Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism and the 1930s Stuart Murray Victoria University Press, $44.95, ISBN 0 86473 341 0 An Englishman, teaching in Dublin, who takes our most carefully constructed decade, insinuates himself into one of our…
National revolutionary, Stuart Murray
It is intriguing now to flick through the special issue, the self-styled festschrift, of Islands commissioned to mark Frank Sargeson’s seventy-fifth birthday, that appeared in March 1978. A tone of reverence and celebration of the writer sweeps through the pages.…
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