Qu’est-ce que la littérature océanienne ? Cette question liminaire et peut-être naïve veut lever tout risque de malentendu, mais aussi indiquer le projet fondateur de cette recherche : écouter et reconnaître les voix du grand « océan d’îles » d’Epeli Hau’ofa1 dans leur pleine originalité. Il est en effet difficile d’imaginer une situation plus paradoxale que celle de la région Pacifique et de ses habitants, qui ont fait couler tant d’encre occidentale depuis le XVIIIe siècle, mais dont la voix propre n’est, aujourd'hui encore, que très rarement entendue en dehors de la région, mais aussi à l’intérieur.2 Le champ littéraire océanien Les corpus littéraires désignés comme « océaniens » varient selon les auteurs : ainsi dans une conférence de 2002 intitulée « Tahiti ou l’atelier d’une invention littéraire »,3 Daniel Margueron utilisait la dénomination « littérature océanienne » pour évoquer les premiers écrits européens sur le Pacifique et plus précisément Tahiti, réservant aux littératures contemporaines produites par des écrivains maohi les dénominations « littérature polynésienne francophone dite d’émergence » ou littérature « tahitianophone » pour les écrits en langue maohi. Cependant, dans la plupart des anthologies, actes de colloques ou articles publiés à ce jour, la dénomination « littérature océanienne » vient plutôt désigner les littératures émergentes produites en Océanie par des auteurs qui y vivent de façon permanente. On observe toutefois des différences notables lorsqu’il s’agit de délimiter le champ exact des littératures océaniennes. Les anthologies disponibles aujourd'hui peuvent fournir des indications précieuses sur les représentations dominantes de ce que sont ces littératures. Elles distinguent de fait, à travers les sélections sur lesquelles elles s’appuient, plusieurs grands ensembles. -- from Introduction

Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) produced a substantial body of writing that included six novels, three plays, and two collections of sermons. Despite the large audience he reached in his own time, and the interest he aroused in a number of later poets and novelists, Maturin's work has not received very much serious attention from critics. The present study attempts to take a fresh look at all Maturin's work, exploring it sympathetically from a variety of directions. Melmoth is included, but because it has dominated previous discussion of Maturin, I have chosen to concentrate on his neglected novels, Fatal Revenge, The Wild Irish Boy, The Milesian Chief, Women, or Pour et Contre, and The Albigenses. Special attention is given here to Maturin's two volumes of sermons (a valuable but seldom used source of information about his religious philosophy) and, more generally, to the theme of religion, which links many of his novels. This aspect of Gothic literature deserves a closer study than it usually receives, particularly in the work of Maturin who was a minister of religion. My thesis proposes a new interpretation of Fatal Revenge based on the parallel that Maturin developed between the use of superstition by Orazio and its use by the Catholic church. In The Albigenses there is a similar parallel between the outlaws and the supposedly holy Crusaders. Maturin took the Catholic church so often as his subject, not simply because it provided a colourful, stereotyped background (as some have suggested), but because it was a context in which he could seriously investigate the psychological pressures that produced (and still produce) conformity, extremism, and sexual violence. While his studies of oppressive societies may at times remind us of twentieth-century works such as 1984 or The Trial, Maturin's fiction is very much a part of its age. After a chapter that explores the history of 'the Gothic', my thesis focuses on the particular context of Maturin's period, mapping it initially by examining the responses to his work that appeared in print during his lifetime. Those reviews and essays make visible the complex field of forces in which Maturin worked. The Gothic novel developed in an age of more than usual ferment - literary, religious, and political - including the first phase of what we would today describe as feminist rebellion. All this was accompanied, as we can see from the criticism, by a strong conservative reaction in defence of the threatened values. The present study emphasizes the ways in which Maturin's work shared the new energies associated with change, even though it also displayed signs of ambivalence. I consider the reasons for this ambivalence and argue that in many cases there is subtlety in what appears at first to be confusion. Maturin's fiction was a late addition to the Gothic tradition, but its particular kinds of complexity - such as its psychological depth - made it an important development of the genre and linked it with other innovative writing of the period. Some admirers of Maturin have sought to play down the Gothic element in his work, which is understandable in view of the low esteem in which the genre has been held. The Gothic has often been seen, for example, as a confused rehearsal for Romanticism. While acknowledging the variety of Maturin's novels, I have sought to emphasise their continuing links with the Gothic genre and its special energies. During the past decade, new forms of Gothic criticism have appeared that treat the subject with greater seriousness. Today, interest in the Gothic genre seems to be springing to life again, and its relevance to our own time (which is also a period of complex social change and widespread ambivalence) has become clearer. I have attempted to contribute to this new type of criticism by pointing out the value of Maturin's studies of oppression and his ability to go beyond stereotypes in his treatment of women characters. I have also suggested some links between Gothic literature and feminist science-fiction writing today. In general, the aim of this thesis has been to consider the most mature Gothic fiction (such as that of Maturin) not merely as fantasy but as an expanded vision of reality. / Note: Thesis now published. Dunsford, C (2007). Painting life in extremes Charles Maturin and the Gothic genre. NZ: Global Dialogues Press. ISBN 9780968245340

Poetry in New Zealand, nearly everyone agrees, came to birth around 1920, or 1930, or 1940; in fact, round about when those who are now the grand old men of New Zealand letters were boys. No doubt future generations will see it as beginning in 1950, or 1960, or 1970. In any case, no attempt will be made in this work to upset such a widely-held belief – my researches are unashamedly foetal, a chronicle of the first faint heart-beats, the first weak kicks, and a whole lot of morning-sickness. It is something less than a ‘study’ of poetic pre-history; to try to consider New Zealand poetry before 1930 ‘in depth’ would be like practising diving in a mangrove swamp. On the other hand, although I have quoted extensively, it is something more than an anthology. Its purpose is to review the course of poetry in this country since it began, so that those who are interested in colonial verse can get some idea of what would have been its ‘development’ if it had developed, without having to wade through the four hundred or so volumes in which it is embalmed.

CHRISTINA STEAD (1902-1983) is a major Australian woman writer, and this thesis explores one of the least known periods in her life and work, the years she spent in the United States (1937- 7946). During this time she wrote her two best known novels, The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone, both based on autobiographical material. This study explores contextual aspects of Stead's life and work in New York, drawing on a considerable amount of new material. (Chapters I and II) During this period Stead wrote partly out of a personal need to understand her own life situation, and psychological readings of three novels, The Man who Loved Children, For Love Alone and Letty Fox, seen as a 'father trilogy', are designed to open up new lines of enquiry into aspects of all of these novels. (Chapters III and IV) The thesis also discusses formal aspects of Stead's work, beginning with her own formulation of an esthetics of the novel, which occurred during a course she gave in New York in 1943 called Workshop in the Novel. (Chapter V) The relevance of this course for her own practice as a novelist is also explored, with particular reference to the two later American novels A Little TeA, A Little Chat and, The People with The Dogs. (Chapter VI) In Chapter VII an exploration of Stead's interest in the genre of the novella, focussing on the collection The Puzzleheaded Girl, continues the formal lines of enquiry opened up in the previous two chapters, and in the following chapter the same collection provides a starting point for a consideration of Stead's deep interest in the situation of women in modern society, especially the recurrent figure of the wanderer or female rebel. The last chapter concentrates on the literary self-portraits which appeared in Stead's American fiction after The Man who Loved Children and For Love Alone, and their curiously limited characterization is compared with the more vigorous portrait of her provided in one of the novels of her husband, William Blake. This thesis, then, argues that Stead's life fed her fiction, especially in her American period, and that her work was part of a broader personal quest. Understanding this quest is relevant to a discussion of her literary style, and to her personal use of autobiographical material in her fiction, and it illuminates aspects of the creative process itself. Stead's need to understand her own life not only shaped her fiction, it also provided it with the 'intelligent ferocity' she aimed for, and resulted in a major 'realist' writer.

The text which follows is a critical modern spelling edition of ‘Wit at Several Weapons’ devised according to the principles established for the editors of the Revels series of English Renaissance plays. Punctuation has been altered from the original 17th Century edition to conform as far as possible with current practice. Elisions in verb endings have been quietly expanded thus the forms “-ed” and “-est” appear throughout, except where the metre demands their retention. Speech headings too have been slightly regularised, in an abbreviated form, throughout the play. Where a single line is divided between two or more speakers the second (or subsequent) speaker’s portion of the line is indented. Obvious errors in the copy-text have been emended and the emendations recorded in the collation. Any editorial insertions such as scene-headings and added or altered stage-directions, are placed within square brackets.

The intention of this thesis is to examine in three separate studies the lives, the verse, and other relevant data associated with three New Zealand writers Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, (1896-196), Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn, (1904-1957), and Ronald Alison Kells Mason, (1905 - ). The original suggestion of the choice of these three poets came from Mr R.M. Chapman (then Senior Lecuturer in the Department of History at the University of Auckland) in early 1961; the outlines of the research project were planned by me a little later, advised by Professor S. Musgrove and Drs Allen Curnow and C.K. Stead (all of the University of Auckland’s English Department) and undertaken at that University and later at the Massey University of Manawatu, as a research project for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, under the supervision of Dr. Curnow. The choice of the three poets concerned as objects of study was influenced not only by personal interest in their work, but also by a belief (which I feel the thesis may vindicate) that this was an opportune time to begin research into the careers of three men who, with other poets such as Ursula Bethell, Denis Glover, Charles Brasch, and Allen Curnow, may by common consensus be seen to have had a place in the first years of a significant verse tradition in New Zealand – the years from the early 1920s onwards.

This thesis explores the conceptualisation of subjectivity, the past and language in the work of one particular English novelist and critic, A. S. Byatt. In doing so, it examines significant points of overlap between Byatt's fiction and criticism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the discourses that have contributed to their formation. Whilst Byatt's work is inflected by recent critical examinations of the three concepts, this thesis is less concerned with how it reflects prevailing notions of subjectivity, the past and language, than with its participation in an ongoing examination of each. Although I do investigate the interplay between Byatt's fiction and criticism, my focus is on how this is played out in Byatt's fictional texts, in particular the novels. The Introduction offers a brief summary of other criticism on Byatt's work summarises the recent definitions of 'text' and broader discussions of postmodernism that have impacted on my approach to her fiction, and proposes a reading of these texts that accounts for their ambivalence. In Chapter One, I focus on the reconfiguration of subjectivity in Byatt's writing, particularly as it relates to textuality. Chapter Two explores the relationship between present and past in Byatt's fiction that is partly enacted through the texts' own engagement with past literatures, in particular nineteenth-century literature, and the related issues of historiography, linearity and memory that these texts investigate. Language, in particular Byatt's interest in its relation to 'things', is the focus of the third and final chapter of this thesis. Throughout each of the chapters is an exploration of Byatt's engagement or reexamination of a persistent 'thread of two' in Western discourse. Although each chapter focuses on one of the three concepts, each also explores the issues that arise from the conjunction of 'two things' in these fictions: text and subject, present and past, language and the world. Related to this is my consideration of how Byatt's fiction is characterised by a number of contradictory impetuses. Of particular interest is the ambivalence that arises from Byatt's partial engagement with recent critical theory - not only because it reflects larger cultural and discursive movements, but also because it contributes to a productive forging of new forms of fiction that combine an awareness of the concerns of literary and cultural criticism with a desire to evoke pleasure in the texts.

This study is twofold in purpose: (1) to examine the full range of William's writing, a task which has not been undertaken by anyone since Vivienne Koch in 1950. Necessarily, Miss Koch could not consider the poems of William's final, greatest, period, (2) to examine Peterson particularly in relation to draft material at Yale and Buffalo. Many studies of the poem have been published (including Sister M, B. Quinn's important essay and recently, Walter Scott Paterson's book length analysis), but none hitherto from this particular point of view.

The principles of form in ‘mosaic’ poems such as The Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, or even ‘The Waste Land,’ are not yet clearly understood. Criticism needs to bring its various ideas of ‘musical form,’ ‘non-linear form,’ or ‘the poem as a field of forces’ into sharper focus. Mosaic poems are characterized by sudden changes of direction, heightened contrasts of style and texture, a complex use of quotation, and strange effects of fluidity where the usual distinction between the ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ of metaphors is dissolved. To decide what features (if any) of the modern mosaic poem are new, the thesis examines possible precedents: so-called ‘pre-logical’ poetry, the associationism of Romantic poetry, Leaves of Grass, Rimbaud’s poems, Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, etc. the work of European avant-garde poets of the 1910s (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Marinetti, et al.) is considered in detail, and the supposed originality of Pound and Eliot’s poetry is somewhat diminished when it is viewed against this European background. Nevertheless Pound and Eliot do contribute some technical innovations, particularly in the way their poetry combines ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ textures (to use Pound’s terms). The thesis examines Pound’s special ‘breakthrough’ in 1919, and also the close interaction between his work and Eliot’s during this period – the two men advancing ‘like mountaineers roped together.' Mosaic poems demand a new style of ‘reading by field.’ Criticism needs to develop ways of talking about the experience of discontinuity as sensitively as it now deals with continuity. Approaches to The Cantos that emphasize ‘ideogrammic logic’ tend to be over-intellectual and not able to deal adequately with the more fluid or discontinuous aspects of the poem. The thesis explores the procedures of mosaic poetry, its various styles of ‘jumping’ (to use Robert Bly’s term), ways of using fragments evocatively, and ways in which gaps or silences in a poem can be charged with meaning. Since collage is an important feature of mosaic poetry, the thesis attempts to survey this development historically, distinguishing it in some respects from traditional styles of quotation and allusion. The mosaic poem is compared and contrasted with earlier types of poem-sequence. The doubts expressed by Eliot, Tate, and other critics about the coherence of the modern long poem are answered by such essays as ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ in which Pound proposes new ideas of order. But Pound’s poetic practice was still more subtle than his theory, a discrepancy also noted in Eliot’s work. The thesis looks cautiously at the analogy often drawn between mosaic poetry and modern painting or film-making. It also examines the ways in which the music of pre-modern composers such as Bach and Beethoven has been used as a formal model by mosaic poets. The thesis offers a detailed analysis of ‘Canto XLVII’ as a critical experiment in analyzing the reader’s temporal experience of mosaic poetry, his ‘shifting gestalts’ as he explores the ‘field’ of the poem. The analysis seeks to clarify the way in which The Cantos combines ‘Imagist’ hardness with the fluidity of Symbolist poetry.

The purpose of this dissertation has been to investigate the significance of urban imagery in the work of seven American poets: Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Although I have concentrated on the poetry, I have also ranged freely over the published writing of all these men. My conclusions can be reduced to these two propositions: 1. That the significance of a literary city can be understood only in conjunction with an attempt to explore the significance of other literary landscapes. 2. The significance of the city (and other landscapes) as metaphor is to be understood in terms of a basic process whereby the self is realized. This process is most simply represented geographically by a pattern of withdrawal and return, with the city and wilderness figuring as poles between which the self moves. The second proposition can be elaborated as follows: The process begins with the individual in a condition of alienation from his culture. This is culture, not just as a system of meaning and value, but culture as a way in which experience is ordered. At this point in the process, the city becomes a metaphor for the structures whereby a culture orders its common experience. The most basic ground for social alienation is that these structures serve to cut the individual off from experience. The response to this alienation is a desire to undergo a reductive process whereby orientative structures are simplified or demolished. The aim of such a process, which has a corresponding metaphor in the geographical metaphor of withdrawal, is to restore contact with experience. The experiential world is characterized by the absence of structure. Its cardinal metaphor is nature as wilderness (wildness), though, again, the city as oceanic and dislocative can fulfil a like function. It is in the unmediated intercourse with such a world that the self is realized. At this point a sense of meaning and value arises as experience is assimilated and integrated. The result of such an integration is a structure valid for the self—a structure, we might note, with no claims to permanence or finality. What is discovered in the wilderness is not so much a final structure, as a way of structuring. Which is what the realized individual brings back to the society from which he remains alienated. As the city can serve as metaphor for social structures, so it can serve as a metaphor for the structure (and the way of structuring) that might be--an ideal city. The final task is the discovery of a role that might facilitate the realization of this authentic culture.