Nicholas Reid

Hard Frost: Structures of feeling in New Zealand literature, 1908–1945 by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2017), 368 pp., $40

After Stuart Murray’s Never a Soul at Home (VUP 1998), Lawrence Jones’ Picking Up the Traces (VUP 2003) and numerous other texts of literary revisionism, it is hard to imagine that anything new can be said about New Zealand’s mid-century literary nationalism. Another book covering this territory must have at least a new angle of vision. Fortunately John Newton’s Hard Frost does have such an angle, although many of Newton’s observations inevitably overlap with those of previous literary historians.

Hard Frost is the first volume of a proposed trilogy, which will eventually take Newton up to the 1970s. Its ‘Afterword’ is like a preview of coming attractions as it fades out on Charles Brasch and Denis Glover setting up Landfall in 1947 and looks forward to a new sort of New Zealand literary production in the 1950s.  [Read more…]

Lawrence Jones

A History of New Zealand Literature, edited by Mark Williams (Cambridge UP 2016), 417 pp., $225.95

Until the publication of this book in April 2016 there had been only one multi-author history of New Zealand literature – The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, second edn. 1998), although there had been single-author histories, most notably two by E.H. McCormick (1940, 1959) and Patrick Evans’s The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990). By its general title and its Cambridge University Press origin this book seems to invite comparison to the Oxford History, but a comparison reveals they are really quite different kinds of histories.

The Oxford History is a very large book, topping 900 pages in the second edition, and had a large printing. Editor Terry Sturm, in his introductions to both editions, claimed it to be ‘a comprehensive work of literary reference, working on inclusive rather than selective principles’; inclusive partly because as the first full history in the field it engaged in ‘the mapping, simply, of what has been written in English, and largely lost to view, over nearly two centuries’. It was ‘addressed not simply to specialist readers but to the rapidly expanding body of educated general readers of New Zealand books in New Zealand and overseas’.  [Read more…]