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In 1920 New Zealanders were shocked by the news that the brilliant, well-connected mayor of genteel Whanganui had shot a young gay poet, D' Arcy Cresswell, who was blackmailing him. They were then riveted by the trial that followed. Mackay was sentenced to hard labour and later left the country, only to be shot by a police sniper during street unrest in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Mackay had married into Whanganui high society, and the story has long been the town' s dark secret. The outcome of years of digging by historian Paul Diamond, this book shines a clear light on the vengeful impulses behind the blackmail and Mackay' s ruination. The cast of this tale includes the Prince of Wales, the president of the RSA, Sir Robert Stout, Blanche Baughan . . . even Lady Ottoline Morrell. But it is much more than an extraordinary story of scandal. At its heart, the Mackay affair reveals the perilous existence of homosexual men and how society conspired to control and punish them.
The story of the generation of New Zealand writers who came of age in the 1930s and who deliberately and decisively changed the course of literature is told in this book, shedding important new light on the key participants, including Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, and Robin Hyde. The movement is traced through small circulation magazines and small press publications from 1932 to 1941. The repudiations and loyalties by which the movement defined itself are explored, including its opposition to the literary establishment and to late Georgian verse, its naming of its precursors and allies from the 1920s, and its choice of overseas models such as the British Moderns and the new American short-story writers for the creation of a new literature. oppose the cultural myths supported by the literary establishment and the writers' responses to the world-wide social upheavals of the period -- the Depression, the international crises of 1935 to 1939, and World War II.
"Brilliant, beautiful, difficult and doomed, Iris Wilkinson (known as the writer Robin Hyde) led a short, tumultuous and incredibly productive life. Here her story is told for the first time in a dramatic and deeply moving narrative. Researched by both authors from 1965 to 1971, it was written in a first draft by Iris Wilkinson's friend, Gloria Rawlinson; since Rawlinson's death in 1995 it has been revised and completed by Derek Challis, Wilkinson's son. It includes appalling accounts of hidden pregnancies, harsh experience as a solo mother, dependence on drugs, intimate acquaintance with sexism and poverty, mental breakdown, and a perilous trip to China in wartime. There are deep friendships and hurtful betrayals. Always there is a dedicated and determined commitment to writing. ..."--Jacket.
"... This book brings together for the first time the best of Hyde's journalism. Alongside extracts from the now out of print Journalese (1934) are previously uncollected articles and reviews from newspapers and magazines, ranging in subject matter from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Spanish Civil War, from China in the thirties to the Queen Street Riots. These detailed and vivid accounts of aspects of New Zealand society and the international situation have an urgency with makes them relevant to us all.The biographical introduction offers a fuller picture than we have had of this remarkable writer, drawing on interviews, letters and the work itself." -- Back cover.
First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importanc...
Poet, polemicist, pagan, and pretender to the throne of Poland, Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was one of the glittering generation of New Zealand poets of the 1930s. His career took a strange turn after he was imprisoned for obscene libel. Following a celebrated trial in London, he became increasingly eccentric, dressing in mock-medieval garb, claiming the throne of Poland, and issuing a stream of poetry and pamphlets, before returning to New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the first time his full story has been told and it will be relevant to those interested in the literature of obscenity, the history of censorship, and private press publishing in the 20th century.
Written with humour and acerbic observation by a former managing editor of Auckland University Press, Dennis McEldowney, A Press Achieved charts the origins of the press up to its formal recognition in 1972. Drawing on both documents and memory, this two-part volume is a valuable contribution to the history of the book in New Zealand and offers an intriguing view of university politics, as well as glimpses into New Zealand culture.
"But this scholarly achievement was in many ways matched by the part he played in the intellectual and cultural life of New Zealand in his time. A prolific writer and critic he became committed to making New Zealand a more lively and civilised place to live, and through his work at Victoria University, his teaching, his involvement with the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust - among many such organisations - his influence was far reaching." "Drawing on J.C. Beaglehole's own writing, especially his sparkling unpublished letters, the author has woven together all the aspects of his father's life into an immensely readable narrative. The two chapters on Beaglehole's work on James Cook create a picture of the historical scholar at work, and give the book an international significance."--BOOK JACKET.