Dean, A; (2020) New Zealand Literature and the World. In: Helgesson, S and Neumann, B and Rippl, G, (eds.) Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures. (pp. 531-548). De Gruyter: Berlin, Germany.

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Abstract

As in the title of a well-known New Zealand poem, the nation’s literature can be thought of as ‘a small room with large windows’ (Curnow 2017 [1962], 137–139). Katherine Mansfield’s early writing brings late nineteenth-century British aestheticism together with the materials offered by the colonial frontier; in her mature writing, she would draw from the imaginative resources that the colony offered, to bring a particular angle to modernism. Her model would prove decisive, as New Zealand writers would find themselves moving between the local and different understandings of the ‘world’ – and often while contesting Mansfield’s legacies. For cultural nationalists from the 1930s to 1960s, the literature reflected a distinctive identity in the making (albeit connecting with other nationalisms and culturalist theories then circulating). The emergence of a more playful, distinctly ‘American’ register from the 1970s indicates a changing understanding of New Zealand’s literature’s distinctiveness. Finally, Māori and Pasifika writing shows New Zealand literature to be part of a ‘sea of islands’, connected to practices of migration, translation, and incorporation.

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