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Literary Criticism

Pioneers to Poetics

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July 1983, no. 52

There have been important publications in each of the fields of literary criticism, memoirs and biography, and history in New Zealand during the last few years. In a brief survey it is hardly possible to cover the field entirely; what I can do is to indicate what I take to be the important titles in each of these areas.

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The critic’s desire

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December 1992, no. 147

Oxford University Press has begun a welcome series called Australian Writers. Two further titles, Imre Salusinszky on Gerald Murnane and Ivor Indyk on David Malouf, will appear in March next year and eleven more books are in preparation. Though I find the first three uneven in quality, they make a very promising start to a series. In some ways they resemble Oliver and Boyd’s excellent series, Writers and Critics, even being of about the same length. However this new series is less elementary, more demanding of the reader. It is, predictably, far sparser in critical evaluation, concentrating on hermeneutics, and biographical information is as rare as a wombat waltz.

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SOUTHERLY: VOL. 73, NO. 2 edited by David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon

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April 2014, no. 360
Nigel Featherstone reviews 'Southerly', Volume. 73, No. 2

Each note of the nightingale’s song is sung in only one tenth of a second. For humans to be able to appreciate the nuances of those elaborate performances, the songs have to be recorded and slowed down for replay.’ So writes Teja B. Pribac, guest editor of the latest Southerly, subtitled Lyre/Liar. Pribac goes on to explain that her volume examines ‘emerging ethical implications of writing, with particular emphasis on representations of nonhuman animals’.

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Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life by Robert Milder

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June 2013, no. 352
Shannon Burns reviews 'Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life' by Robert Milder

Unlike Hawthorne: A Life (2003), Brenda Wineapple’s penetrating and engaging biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Habitations, is a work of literary criticism informed by a narrow but fascinating range of biographical details and sources. These details support Robert Milder’s construction of an author ‘divided’ by contradictory drives that remained unresolved in Hawthorne’s fiction and life.\

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V.S. Naipaul: Man and writer by Gillian Dooley

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March 2007, no. 289
Kavita Nandan reviews 'V.S. Naipaul: Man and writer' by Gillian Dooley

Given V.S. Naipaul’s status in the literary world, and the prolific commentary on him and his writing, you might ask what is different about Gillian Dooley’s book, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Dooley’s sympathetic attitude liberates both Naipaul and his writing from critical analyses and from critics with explicit post-colonial and political agendas. She is more than aware of how ‘the reductions of political analysis’ have negatively stereotyped Naipaul’s writing. Rather, she focuses on Naipaul’s genius as a writer, which is not separate from the high standard of ethics, courage, fastidiousness, insecurities and prejudices of the man. For it is these very attributes that Naipaul has inherited from his colonial background that make his writing so rich, remarkable and controversial.

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Westerly edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell & HEAT edited by Ivor Indyk

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February 2007, no. 288
Lyn McCredden reviews 'Westerly vol. 51' edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell and 'HEAT no. 12' edited by Ivor Indyk

Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox with a subscription form.

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Famous Reporter edited by Ralph Wessman et al. (eds) & Etchings edited by Sabine Hopfer, Christopher Lappas and Patrick Allington

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February 2007, no. 288

Here we have one brand new literary journal, Etchings, and one which, by comparison, is practically geriatric: Famous Reporter. There is now a proliferation of literary journals, and SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) has emerged to advance their cause. We know that mainstream publishing is producing less diverse material, and that it is increasingly not Australian. The vast majority of publishing in Australia, as Michael Wilding has highlighted, is now done by local branches of big transnational corporations. Malcolm Knox has revealed the ‘governing management principles’ of such organisations. These include ‘segmentation and internal competition’: whereas in the past a publisher subsidised ‘book sections’, now a publisher will say ‘each of these books is a discrete unit and is at war with each other unit, and if the CSIRO Diet Book does well, we will reward the diet books section with the money to repeat that success. And if the poets continue to languish, we’ll have no more poetry.’ Poetry, of course, was effectively given the flick by mainstream publishers Penguin and OUP in the 1990s. As Mark Davis says, publishers are now akin to gamblers who ‘back winners’. This may always have been true, but now they’re putting more money on the favourites and none on the roughies. In this environment, literary journals that publish poetry are crucial to maintaining a diverse local literary culture.

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Toil and Spin: Two directions in modern poetry by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

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April 1980, no. 19
John McLaren reviews 'Toil and Spin' by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

In a world which has lost its faith and its standards, the situation of the creative artist is both central and precarious. As Wallace­-Crabbe sees it, he must stand inside and outside society at once, be both totally involved with himself and totally responsive to his society. While doing this, he must create not only his own audience but even his own language.

In this series of essays, Wallace-Crabbe explores this dilemma in the work of contemporary English-language poets ranging from Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop, and from W. H. Auden – ‘the good Christian practices light verse’ – to Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. The essays both illuminate the work of the writers he discusses and contribute to our understanding of the crucial problem of contemporary culture.

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