You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Aotearoa New Zealand, "a tiny Pacific country," is of great interest to those engaged in postcolonial and literary studies throughout the world. In all former colonies, myths of national identity are vested with various interests. Shifts in collective Pakeha (or New Zealand-European) identity have been marked by the phenomenal popularity of three novels, each at a time of massive social change. Late-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the collapse of the idea of a singular 'nation' can be traced through the reception of John Mulgan's Man Alone (1939), Keri Hulme's the bone people (1983), and Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors (1990). Yet close analysis of these three novels also reveals marginalization and silencing in claims to singular Pakeha identity and a linear development of settler acculturation. Such a dynamic resonates with that of other 'settler' cultures - the similarities and differences telling in comparison. Specifically, Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand explores how concepts of race and ethnicity intersect with those of gender, sex, and sexuality. This book also asks whether 'Pakeha' is still a meaningful term.
None
“A nuanced and convincing approach to evaluating the role of media in shaping African identities.” —James Burns, Clemson University This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. Exploring questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Katrina Daly Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community. Thompson offers a unique understanding of how media reflect and contribute to Zimbabwean culture, language, and ethnicity. “Katrina Daly Thompson has made a fine con...
In Aboriginal and Māori literature, the circle and the spiral are the symbolic metaphors for a never-ending journey of discovery and rediscovery. The journey itself, with its indigenous perspectives and sense of orientation, is the most significant act of cultural recuperation. The present study outlines the fields of indigenous writing in Australia and New Zealand in the crucial period between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s – particularly eventful years in which postcolonial theory attempted to ‘centre the margins’ and indigenous writers were keen to escape the particular centering offered in search of other positions more in tune with their creative sensibilities. Indigenous writ...
FIRST TO CARE: 125 YEARS OF THE ORDER OF ST JOHN IN NEW ZEALAND, 1885-2010 brings to life the history of one of our most ubiquitous and vital charitable organisations. The heavily illustrated book provides a vivid account of public-spiritedness, enterprise and innovation by people involved in St John over the past 125 years, peppered with occasional disputes and setbacks along the way. St John invented and popularised 'first aid' as we know it. It provided medical assistance from the sidelines of our sports fields from as early as 1891 and it played a leading role in disaster relief from its formative days. From humble beginnings it established a nationwide ambulance service that today is the envy of the St John fraternity worldwide.
Janet Frame's literary career was inextricably woven into the fabric of the twentieth-century New Zealand literary scene. However, she also became New Zealand's best-known international writer and her great literary influence in both fields has not been charted before now. This study also seeks to redress the excessive commitment in scholarship to maintaining, even celebrating, Frame's reputation as a psychologically disturbed writer. This book surveys all aspects of Janet Frame's biographical legend by considering her later literary and autobiographical works, Jane Campion's film adaptation of the autobiographies, An Angel at my Table, as well as biographies and literary histories that both rely on and contribute to her well-known legend. In doing so, the author hopes to offer novel perspectives on Frame's literary production, on Frame scholarship, on auto/biographical theories and on New Zealand literary history.
A heartwarming account of one woman's journey through Africa and adoption, Africa All The Way shares the stories and challenges of living and working in Africa. It is a humourous yet at times moving book which explores the reality of HIV/AIDS and its impact on the children left behind.
Janet Frame’s work is notorious for the demands it makes on reader and critic. This collection of nine new essays by international Frame specialists draws on a range of critical frameworks to explore fresh ways of looking at Frame’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography. At the same time, the essays plug into the energy of Frame’s work to challenge our thinking within and beyond these frameworks. Frameworks offers a unique perspective on Frame studies today, showcasing its major concerns as well as heralding new Frame narratives for the decade ahead. Mindful of preceding Frame criticism, these essays use their contemporary vantage-point to recast seminal questions about the relationship between Janet Frame’s work and its critical contexts. Each of the essays makes a case for framing her work in a particular way, but all are characterized by self-reflexivity regarding their own critical practice and the relationship they assume between exegetical framework and Frame’s work. Underlying this practice, and contained within the pun of the title, are the elementary-sounding yet fundamental questions of Frame studies: How does Frame’s work work? And how do we work with her work?
None
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” —T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 1921 Bloomsbury Influences is an interdisciplinary essay collection developed from papers given at Bath Spa University’s Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference. The volume explores the ways that 20th and 21st century art, drama, fiction and philosophy have been influenced and inspired by the work of the Bloomsbury Group and their London milieu. By comparing and contrasting the artistic, philosophical and literary works of the Bloomsbury Group with later artists, writers and thinkers, such as the Singh Twins, Harold Bloom, C. K. Stead, Jeanette Winterson and Ali Smith, amongst many others, each essay examines how, in T. S. Eliot’s words, the past has been “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”.