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This study is based on several assumptions: it recognises that the person who is deformed has an existence both in the world and in the novel; it recognises that in both the world and the novel the deformed-being has borne a negative stigma. It also recognises that a literature reflects its culture, as must the characters who exist within that literature. As Harry Heseltine states succinctly: 'No writer invents his metaphors ex nihilo; in the long run he finds them somewhere in the range of possibility that his culture makes available to him'. This study asks: can that most marginalised of all characters, the deformed-being, provide any revelations about the self, about the novel, the reader of the novel, and the culture within which all exist? The answer in each case is an unequivocal yes. Each chapter is devoted to a particular character in a major Australian novel; comparisons are made with other literary works, Australian and non- Australian. The individual chapters reveal the metaphors and symbolism attached to the character's particular deformity, and demonstrate how the deformed body informs the body of the text. The whole study presents an overall picture of deformity as a fairly consistent and an often-utilised metaphor. Chapter One provides a general survey of deformity as a metaphor. Chapter Two looks at Louis Stone's Jonah (1911), in which the hunchbacked larrikin character is a post-colonial interpretation of the traditionally conjoined outcast states, deformity and criminality. In Chapter Three the dwarf Jackie in Ruth Park's Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) is seen as a metaphor for non-conformity during a time when Australia was signalling a resistance to the Old-World moulding. Chapter Four is also concerned with the post-colonial identity as revealed through the dwarf and half-caste Billy Kwan in C. J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously (1978); it questions an identity that is 'imposed', whether at a national or individual level. In Chapter Five the relationship of the hunchbacked dwarf Rhoda Courtney with her adopted brother, the artist Duffield, in Patrick White's The Vivisector (1970) places deformity in the tradition of the kunstlerroman. In Chapter Six, Koch's The Doubleman (1985) is shown to combine elements of the kunstlerroman while raising questions about the post-colonial identity through the dualities arising out of the doppelganger: spiritual, bodily, and cultural displacement are all focussed by the device of Richard Miller's lameness. Chapter Seven moves from deformity that is congenital or disease-originated, to disability or deformity that is human- caused (either by negligence or intervention), thus allowing a discussion of the importance of the etiology of deformity as a device: in Thea Astley's The Acolyte (1972) Jack Holberg's blindness is caused by fly-strike. Chapter Eight examines the use of terror evoked through archetypal evolution of the lame crone Hester Harper in Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1985). In Chapter Nine the crypto-dwarf Arthur Blackberry in James McQueenls Hook's Mountain (1982) is portrayed with the accompanying baggage of dwarf mythology; his implicit demise raises questions about our responses towards the deformed. Chapter Ten is a literary history of eugenics, as seen primarily through Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher (1934) and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children (1940). The conclusion discusses the initial, problems of dealing with a taboo topic, along with reasons for excluding autobiographicaltreatments of deformity, biographical portrayals, war novels, and children's literature. Finally, Leslie Fiedler's comment that deformity is the reigning metaphor of our age is shown to be particularly apt in an Australian context.

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The primary aim of this thesis Me he korokoro kōmako [‘With the throat of a bellbird’] is to demonstrate the existence of a distinctive Māori aesthetic in Māori literature written in English. Its introductory section, of three chapters, investigates the ways in which mainstream critical discourse in various ways appropriates Māori literature to its own Western-derived models of meaning and values, and proposes instead a definition of a Māori aesthetic grounded in the principle of whakapapa, whose whole cultural components for Māori literature include distinctive textual functions for myth, orality, acts of naming, other aspects of language, and symbolism. The concept of whakapapa also provides the organizing principle and methodology of the central chapters of the thesis, which are divided into two Parts – each of six chapters. These are framed by a Prologue and Epilogue, whose subject is the profound cultural symbolism of the waka in the work of a founding figure for Māori writing in English, Jacqueline Sturm, and in Star Waka, by a major later writer in English, Robert Sullivan. Part One devotes three chapters each to the adult fiction of one female writer, Patricia Grace (Potiki and Baby No-Eyes), and one male writer, Witi Ihimaera (The Matriarch). Part Two, following the principle of whakapapa, devotes six chapters to Māori literature for children. Its primary text is the major anthology of such writing – Te Ara O Te Hau: The Path of the Wind, Volume 4 of Te Ao Mārama, edited by Witi Ihimaera, with Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D.S. Long. It grounds its reading of the volume’s many texts (literary and visual, in Māori and in English) in the many distinctive cultural behaviours and meanings attached to the figure of Māui. Each of the authors and texts has been chosen in order to study and exemplify a particular aspect of the Māori aesthetic defined in the Introduction, through close readings which draw strongly on the work of major Māori social historians, authors of iwi histories and genealogies, and interpreters of cultural meanings attaching to the natural worlds, and recent work on literary stylistics by Geoffrey Leech and others. It also draws on conversations with numerous Māori informants, including some of the authors discussed. The readings are designed to reveal the rich, culturally contextualised knowledges which Māori readers bring to the texts, and which their authors share and invoke through their deployment of the values and practices of whakapapa. While such representations and explorations of self offer new interpretive possibilities for Pākehā readers, they are also part of a global movement in which indigenous peoples engage in the politics of decolonisation from a position of strength, the stance of self-knowledge. E kore e hekeheke he kākano rangatira Our ancestors will never die for they live on in each of us. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.