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Metaphors are ubiquitously used in the humanities to bring the tangibility of the concrete world to the elaboration of abstract thought. Drawing on this cognitive function of metaphors, this collection of essays focuses on the evocative figures of the ‘gateway’ and the ‘wall’ to reflect on the state of postcolonial studies. Some chapters – on such topics as maze-making in Canada and the Berlin Wall in the writings of New Zealand authors – foreground the modes of articulation between literal borders and emotional (dis)connections, while others examine how artefacts ranging from personal letters to clothes may be conceptualized as metaphorical ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’ that le...
Kai Jensen takes a provocative look at masculinity in New Zealand literature. He argues that New Zealand writing around the Second World War was shaped by excitement about masculinity as a way of challenging society. Inspired partly by Marxism, writers such as A.R.D. Fairburn, Denis Glover, John Mulgan and Frank Sargeson linked national identity to the ordinary working man or soldier, and attempted to merge artistic activity and manliness in a new ideal, the whole man. This masculine excitement forged a literary and intellectual culture which was powerful for thirty years, and which discouraged women writers. Jensen suggests that the aftermath of masculinism still influences the way New Zeal...
Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English brings together the proceedings of a symposium organised by the editors at the University of Trento in 1990. At a time when the study of the post-colonial literatures is gaining more widespread recognition, scholars based mainly at universities in Italy and Germany were invited to address the manner in which writers are giving literary expression to the complexity of contemporary post-colonial and multicultural societies and to consider, from their differing perspectives on the new literatures, central questions of formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, social and political commitment, textual theory and cross-cul...
Brilliantly tracing the progress of unexpected love and the perils of relationships, this gripping novel is a tour de force. Temporarily in Auckland while her husband is undergoing treatment, Sarah enjoys a walk in the coolness of the Symonds Street Cemetery. As she pauses at the grave of Emily Keeling, murdered in 1886 by a rejected suitor, a stranger named Hartley strikes up a conversation. Before long he arranges to meet Sarah for coffee. So their friendship begins, and soon blossoms into an affair, rich in mutual understanding and sexual excitement. But love may become obsession, which brings with it disquieting demands, even menace. ‘When love is not madness, it is not love.’
A guide to print culture in Aotearoa, the impact of the book and other forms of print on New Zealand. This collection of essays by many contributors looks at the effect of print on Maori and their oral traditions, printing, publishing, bookselling, libraries, buying and collecting, readers and reading, awards, and the print culture of many other language groups in New Zealand.
In a land caught between the sea and cloud, where the natural landscape still refuses civilization, there are those; the composers of words, tellers of tales, that help shape the minds of the people that live on its shores. They are spiritcarvers. New Zealand writing today is engaging in an intent struggle to subvert multiple shapes into voices. These interviews, as a record of biographical orature, are shaped into presenting the figure of the storyteller through memory and language; explorations of how we imagine and create ourselves with and into words. Here we encounter the dichotomy of fiction and non-fiction, myth and consensual reality, imagination and truth: do we live within our own selected fictions? Identity is shaped by the authors' sense of displacement as well as of belonging - meeting otherness with dispossession, discovering connection through isolation. Among the focal points of the interviews are the role of women's writing, Maori writing, interrelations among different cultures, and the influence of literary and oral tradition within New Zealand.
This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate chang...
**2014 Must Read** Otago Daily Times 'The life, the health, the intelligence, and the morals of the nation count for more than riches, and I would rather have this country free from want and squalor and unemployed than the home of multi-millionaires.'—Richard Seddon, 1905 *** Casting a long shadow over New Zealand history, Richard John Seddon, Premier from 1893 to his untimely death in 1906, held a clear vision for the country he led. Pushing New Zealand in more egalitarian directions than ever before, he was both the builder and the maintenance man – if not the architect – of our country. Challenging popular opinion of New Zealand's longest-serving Prime Minister as a ruthless pragmat...
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