Keri Hulme's Breath Poetics

Breath plays a small, but important, role in the work of Keri Hulme. My interest in this essay is to consider what happens when Hulme's representation of breath is brought into conversation with the respiratory poetics of modernism, modernist anthropology, and planetary modernism to address Hulme's contribution to an Aotearoa New Zealand modernism. This conversation is played out in Keri Hulme's treatment of hau or ‘breath’. The essay argues that Keri Hulme, in her prose works the bone people (1984) and Te kaihau/The windeater (1986), develops a respiratory poetics: an interrogation of anthropology through experimentations with form.

Deconstruction of metanarrative in postcolonial text: interpretation of Christian code in Keri Hulme’s novel “The Bone People”

This article examines the projection of the European metanarrative in postcolonial text on the example of deconstruction of the Christian metanarrative in Keri Hulme’s novel “The Bone People” (1985). The concept of “metanarrative” is described through the prism of literary studies as a criterion for analyzing the evolution of literary process in the era of postmodernism. In postcolonial research, metanarrative has vast theoretical potential and manifests as a dominant code dictated by the European culture as a dominant one, culture of colonized nations, which makes the authors of postcolonial period refer to the method of deconstruction of metanarratives of the former colonialists. Practical analysis is conducted on the postcolonial novel that interpreted such components and the storyline, imagery of the heroes, and paratextual level. The scientific novelty of this study consists in the fact that the literary process in New Zeland as a whole, and works of the representatives of Maori Renaissance in particular, are insufficiently studied by the contemporary scholars. The analysis of deconstruction of the Christian metanarrative in postcolonial text allows making the following conclusions: uniqueness of deconstruction of metanarrative in a postcolonial text is based on application of the counter-discursive strategies, which include reference to the elements of metanarrative, presentation as a part of colonial discursive field, and authorial transformation for inscribing them into postcolonial space.

Māori Novels in English

This chapter discusses the history of Maōri novels written primarily in English and for adult readers, taking as its definitional starting point the self-identification of the author as Maōri. Critics have variously situated Maōri fiction in terms of international literary trends or regionally, as part of Pacific literature. The question that arises is whether it is most productive to read the Maōri novel in a comparative framework with other Indigenous literatures. The chapter considers English-language novels published in four different periods: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s; the last period has seen the glocalization of the Maōri novel as writers have ventured into fantasy, magic realism, and Maōri sci-fi. Major Maōri novelists include Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Witi Ihimaera, and Paula Morris.

Aotearoa/New Zealand

This chapter discusses the history of publishing, particularly of the English-language novel, in Aotearoa/New Zealand since 1950. It begins with a review of the local book scene during the period 1950–1965, when aspiring novelists faced many publication difficulties, such as the dominance of the local fiction market by British publishers and the power of publishers to fix and determine retail prices and bookseller discounts. It then turns to the years 1965–1980, when serious literary novels began to attract attention, and the 1980s, when New Zealand fiction gained overseas recognition after the 1984 novel the bone people by Keri Hulme won the 1985 Booker Prize. The chapter also examines important developments in the 1990s, such as the emergence of small independent publishers like Tandem Press and the proliferation of book festivals, and since 2000, including the expansion of internet bookselling and the rise in popularity of e-books.

Liminal spaces and imaginary places in The bone people by Keri Hulme and The folly by Ivan Vladislavic

This article argues that the transcendent power of the imagination represented by literature and novels in particular, has played a major role in aiding societies to confront and deal with specific social and political realities in a multicultural global society. The fact that novels represent the development of fictional characters in time and space, enables the reader to experience the lives of the protagonists in a vicarious fashion. In fact, the concept of liminality (with regard to the different stages of separation, transition and re-integration into society) is emulated in the reading process. The interstitial space provided by liminality is especially pertinent to postcolonial novels such as “The bone people” by Keri Hulme. In this novel Hulme illustrates how fictional characters, in an individual and social sense, have to experience “rites of passage” in order to come to terms with traumatic changes in their lives and cultures. In a different way and with the bigoted South African apartheid society (including the reader) as target, Vladislavic exploits the power of the imagination to launch a subtle, yet stringent critique on people who lack imagination and consequently fail to use it constructively in order to transcend their narrow-minded reality – similar to Patrick White in his condemnation of restrictive social conventions in Australian society in his novel “Voss”.