scholarly journals Maori Writing: Speaking with Two Mouths

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Makereti
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Traditions

Drawing on her own experiences as a novelist and anthologist, Tina Makereti explores the situation of the Māori writer as someone “speaking with two mouths,” addressing and drawing from both Māori and Pākehā literary traditions and ways of expressing creativity. Considering some examples from her own fiction and the work of other notable writers such as Patricia Grace, Makereti argues for a richer, more expansive conception of Māori and New Zealand literary history, one drawing on, and acknowledging, Māori ways of imagining literature.  

Literary Histories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva-Marie Kröller
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Language ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Literary Histories

This chapter discusses national literary histories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific and summarises the book's main findings regarding the construction and revision of narratives of national identity since 1950. In colonial and postcolonial cultures, literary history is often based on a paradox that says much about their evolving sense of collective identity, but perhaps even more about the strains within it. The chapter considers the complications typical of postcolonial literary history by focusing on the conflict between collective celebration and its refutation. It examines three issues relating to the histories of English-language fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific: problems of chronology and beginnings, with a special emphasis on Indigenous peoples; the role of the cultural elite and the history wars in the Australian context; and the influence of postcolonial networks on historical methodology.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

scholarly journals Rolling back Modernity: Selective Tradition and Contemporary Literary Politics in the South Pacific

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lawn
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Participation ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Selective Tradition ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand

This article relates Raymond Williams’s concept of “selective tradition” to the shaping of literary history in Aotearoa New Zealand. It makes the case for the ongoing salience of Williams’s narrative of modernity as a “long revolution,” and his sense of the threats to democratic and cultural participation around the turn of the 21st century, as a framework for situating recent cultural politics. The article closes with some suggestions for possible future directions for the development of locally-based materialist literary criticism.

‘The Sultan’s self shan’t carry me’: Negotiations of harem fantasies in Byron’s Don Juan

2011 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sarha
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Sexual Fluidity ◽  
Literary Traditions

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity.

scholarly journals J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Margaret Michael
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
Second World

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence.  The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer.  I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society.  Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society.  Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history.  In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>

scholarly journals Striding Both Worlds: Witi Ihimaera and New Zealand's Literary Traditions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Therese Crocker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
The University

Witi Ihimaera has been a dominant force in New Zealand literature for four decades.  In Striding Both Worlds Melissa Kennedy presents a study of the published works of Ihimaera and considers his place in the New Zealand literary landscape.  The image evoked from the title, of Ihimaera with a foothold in both Maori and Pakeha literary traditions, immediately alerts the reader to a potentially broader reading of Ihimaera's work than may previously have been explored.  Striding Both Worlds is a reworking of Kennedy's 2007 doctoral dissertation: 'Striding Both Worlds: Cross-Cultural Influence in the Work of Witi Ihimaera', a collaboration between Universite de Bourgogne, Dijion and the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. 

Emigration and 19th-Century British Colonial Settler Narratives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara S. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Information Industry ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Global Movements ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Trading Routes

Colonial settler narratives comprise chiefly fictional as well as autobiographically inspired or anecdotal writing about emigration and settler life. The 19th century saw an increasingly systematic mass migration across the globe that proceeded on an unprecedented scale. Global movements, including emigration and return, were facilitated by improved transport technology, new trading routes, and burgeoning emigration societies. A new market for writing about migration and the settler world emerged. The settler narratives of British colonizers present a valuable record of growing public interest in the experience of emigrants and settlers at the time. Whereas accounts of first-hand experience at first simply formed a central part of an expanding information industry and were promptly harnessed by pro-emigration propaganda, settler narratives quickly evolved into a diverse set of writing that consisted of (1) prescriptive and cautionary accounts, presented in narrative form, (2) tales of exploration and adventure, including bush yarns and mateship narratives, as well as (3) detailed descriptions of everyday settler life in domestic and increasingly also New Woman fiction. Equally important, writing produced within the settler colonies had a twofold relationship with British-authored literature, written at the imperial center, and hence participated in the formation of literary traditions on several levels. Exploring Victorian narratives of the colonial settler world helps map how genre travels and becomes transformed, shaping the literature of a global 19th century. These narratives provide a rich source of material for a much-needed reassessment of the diverse experiences and representations of emigration and settlement in the 19th century, while demanding renewed attention as an important part of literary history.

“The Figure in the Carpet”

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Armstrong ◽  
Warren Montag
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
University Administrators ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Quantum Leap ◽  
Canonical Texts

Of Franco Moretti's masterworks of literary history and theory, why is it the loosely assembled collection of occasional pieces Distant Reading that has captured the literary critical spotlight? Why now, just when enrollments in the humanities are plummeting, new technologies for storing and distributing information are revolutionizing interpersonal communication and scientific methods, and global is well on its way to replacing interdisciplinary as the descriptor favored by university administrators? Moretti is not alone in attempting to reconfigure a discipline that tends to favor the singular text and national literary traditions for a generation of students who apparently could not care less about either. In his effort to adapt literary history and form to the conditions of globalization that make them seem irrelevant, he asks us to abandon our obsessive focus on canonical texts—to start instead considering how certain forms of literature made the quantum leap from nation to world and what formal changes they underwent in doing so. This project he warns, will require us to “unlearn” how to read a literary text and to question the assumption that “world literature” is an object to be known: “We must think of it as a problem that asks for a new critical method” (46). He famously exposes this problem by staging various encounters between literary form and quantitative analysis.

TRANSLATING SICILY

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Mallette
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Single Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Literary Coherence

AbstractThis article sketches a theoretical strategy for approaching the literary history of Norman Sicily (centuries XI-XII). Because of its linguistic complexity—during the Norman era, Sicilians wrote in Arabic, Greek, and Latin—literary historians have resisted treating Siculo-Norman literature as a literary-historical category. Rather, the literature has been divided into three discrete, linguistically defined traditions, understood as colonial extensions of mainland literary traditions. Using a reading of Sicilian coins with multilingual inscriptions in order to examine the parallel use of multiple languages in a single "text," this article argues for a reconsideration of Sicilian literature of the era, one that looks at multilingualism not as a challenge to literary coherence but as constitutive of a literary culture.

scholarly journals "It‘s Hard to Keep Track":  Mapping a Shifting Nation in Dylan Horrocks‘s Hicksville

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hamish Clayton
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Formal Properties

<p>Using an art form that justifiably lays claim to both visual and literary genealogies—the graphic novel—Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville advances, rather than strictly challenges, many of the discussions which have informed the local manufacture of art and literature. My purpose in this thesis is to explore Horrocks's deployment of the critical perspectives of both art historical and literary discourse as they have developed from the pre-colonial to the twenty-first century in New Zealand, especially those associated with cultural nationalism. Hicksville claims a particular relation to the existing traditions within both art-historical and literary lines wherein they are conjoined in practice; integrated into the formal properties of Horrocks's work, the traditional concerns of local art and literature are not only subject matter but guide Horrocks‘s approach to narrative. The tension between art and place—the responsibility of the artist to the nation and its referents—appears in Hicksville as a structuring device rather than polemic via its concern with the economisation of art—or global capitalism—as it bears upon particular places and art practices. Yet Horrocks‘s handling of this theme upholds neither aestheticism nor populism. Rather, he invites the reader to make sense of extensive references to a range of artistic figures, from Heaphy to Hergé to Hotere, in a way that accounts for their equal force. Hicksville thus deliberately destabilises the joint histories of art and literary history to pointed effect, valuing its range of artistic and cultural inheritances—whether the visual or literary, the highbrow or lowbrow—for how they can remind us that contemporary artistic accounts of New Zealand must also consider the various ways the country has been constructed throughout its wider</p>

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