This thesis engages with aspects of Witi Ihimaera's oeuvre that demonstrate influences from cultures other than Maori. These may be overt in the fiction, such as plot settings in Venice, Vietnam and Canada, or implicit in his writing mode and style, influenced by English romanticism, Pakeha cultural nationalism, Katherine Mansfield's modernist epiphanies, and Italian verismo opera. In revealing Ihimaera's indebtedness to cultural and aesthetic influences commonly seen as irrelevant to contemporary Maori literature, this thesis reveals a depth and richness in Ihimaera's imaginary that is frequently overlooked and undervalued in New Zealand literary interpretation. Illuminating cross-cultural influence in Ihimaera's works calls into question the applicability of biculturalism as a comprehensive manner of accounting for both Maori cultural ambitions of self-determination and the Maori relationship with Pakeha on the national level. Far from an "us-versus-them" dialectic based on a separatist notion of two individually self-sufficient and complete cultures, Ihimaera's fiction shows Maori culture to have been shaped by a long history of interaction and influence with the colonial British and the Pakeha. This is manifest in the way that the Maori sovereignty and renaissance movements, which gathered force in the 1970s, have been inspired by European concepts of modernity, the structures of nation building and, more recently, by Western globalization described in the theories of transculturation and diaspora. Similarly, in New Zealand literature, Maori writing is commonly considered a parallel genre which describes a distinctive Maori worldview and literary style. Contrary to the familiar interpretation of Ihimaera's fiction from this standpoint, this thesis argues that an emphasis on difference tends to lose sight of fiction's capacity to bring into play issues of differentiation, originality and hybridity through its very form and function. In effect, Maori negotiation of its sovereign space in its literature takes place in its forms rather than in its storyline, for example in multiple linguistic significations, in the text's unstable relationship with reality, and the way that imagery escapes concrete, definitive explanation. In this optic, this thesis analyses little-discussed aspects of Ihimaera's fiction, including his love of opera, the extravagance of his baroque lyricism, his exploration of the science-fiction genre, and his increasing interest in taking Maori into the international arena. While reading against the grain of current New Zealand literary practice, this thesis does not intend to contest such reading. Rather, it endeavours to present an additional, complementary analytical framework, based on a conviction that contemporary Maori-Pakeha cultural and literary negotiation and contestation is far from unique, but a local manifestation of other international and historical efforts for recognition and respect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The principal objective of this doctoral research is to examine the ways in which key contemporary (2000-2005) fictional writings by Māori women authors Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey demonstrate “survivance” – a term used by University of New Mexico Professor Gerald Vizenor and Ohio State University Professor Chadwick Allen to refer to the ways in which indigenous authors use their texts as “a means of cultural survival that comes with denying authoritative representations of [indigenous peoples] in addition to developing an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65). I argue that acts of Māori cultural survivance are manifested in the works of these three authors both internally, in terms of the actions of characters in their fictional narratives, and externally, by the authors themselves who fight for survivance in a literary publishing world that is often slow to recognize and value works of fiction that challenge traditional (Western) modes of novel form and style. Thesis chapters therefore include both extensive critical readings of Grace’s novel Dogside Story (2001), Morris’s novels Queen of Beauty (2002) and Hibiscus Coast (2005), and Morey’s novel Bloom (2003) as well as detailed biographical information based on my interviews with the authors themselves. The thesis emphasizes the ways in which each woman’s approach to writing survivance fiction is largely driven by her personal history and whakapapa. The study also asserts that Grace, Morris and Morey are producing acts of indigenous literary cultural survivance that “imagine the world healthy,” something author and critic Maxine Hong Kingston demands that contemporary writers of critical fictions must do if they are going to convince the book-buying populace “not to worship tragedy as the highest art anymore” (204). Grace, Morris, and Morey depict the creative, generative, and “healthy” aspects of Māori cultural survivance as taking place in both the real and imagined communities which they live in and write about. Their texts offer hope for the ongoing survival – and survivance – of Māori culture in the twenty-first century.

The principal objective of this doctoral research is to examine the ways in which key contemporary (2000-2005) fictional writings by Māori women authors Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey demonstrate “survivance” – a term used by University of New Mexico Professor Gerald Vizenor and Ohio State University Professor Chadwick Allen to refer to the ways in which indigenous authors use their texts as “a means of cultural survival that comes with denying authoritative representations of [indigenous peoples] in addition to developing an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65). I argue that acts of Māori cultural survivance are manifested in the works of these three authors both internally, in terms of the actions of characters in their fictional narratives, and externally, by the authors themselves who fight for survivance in a literary publishing world that is often slow to recognize and value works of fiction that challenge traditional (Western) modes of novel form and style. Thesis chapters therefore include both extensive critical readings of Grace’s novel Dogside Story (2001), Morris’s novels Queen of Beauty (2002) and Hibiscus Coast (2005), and Morey’s novel Bloom (2003) as well as detailed biographical information based on my interviews with the authors themselves. The thesis emphasizes the ways in which each woman’s approach to writing survivance fiction is largely driven by her personal history and whakapapa. The study also asserts that Grace, Morris and Morey are producing acts of indigenous literary cultural survivance that “imagine the world healthy,” something author and critic Maxine Hong Kingston demands that contemporary writers of critical fictions must do if they are going to convince the book-buying populace “not to worship tragedy as the highest art anymore” (204). Grace, Morris, and Morey depict the creative, generative, and “healthy” aspects of Māori cultural survivance as taking place in both the real and imagined communities which they live in and write about. Their texts offer hope for the ongoing survival – and survivance – of Māori culture in the twenty-first century.

The principal objective of this doctoral research is to examine the ways in which key contemporary (2000-2005) fictional writings by Māori women authors Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey demonstrate “survivance” – a term used by University of New Mexico Professor Gerald Vizenor and Ohio State University Professor Chadwick Allen to refer to the ways in which indigenous authors use their texts as “a means of cultural survival that comes with denying authoritative representations of [indigenous peoples] in addition to developing an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65). I argue that acts of Māori cultural survivance are manifested in the works of these three authors both internally, in terms of the actions of characters in their fictional narratives, and externally, by the authors themselves who fight for survivance in a literary publishing world that is often slow to recognize and value works of fiction that challenge traditional (Western) modes of novel form and style. Thesis chapters therefore include both extensive critical readings of Grace’s novel Dogside Story (2001), Morris’s novels Queen of Beauty (2002) and Hibiscus Coast (2005), and Morey’s novel Bloom (2003) as well as detailed biographical information based on my interviews with the authors themselves. The thesis emphasizes the ways in which each woman’s approach to writing survivance fiction is largely driven by her personal history and whakapapa. The study also asserts that Grace, Morris and Morey are producing acts of indigenous literary cultural survivance that “imagine the world healthy,” something author and critic Maxine Hong Kingston demands that contemporary writers of critical fictions must do if they are going to convince the book-buying populace “not to worship tragedy as the highest art anymore” (204). Grace, Morris, and Morey depict the creative, generative, and “healthy” aspects of Māori cultural survivance as taking place in both the real and imagined communities which they live in and write about. Their texts offer hope for the ongoing survival – and survivance – of Māori culture in the twenty-first century.

The principal objective of this doctoral research is to examine the ways in which key contemporary (2000-2005) fictional writings by Māori women authors Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey demonstrate “survivance” – a term used by University of New Mexico Professor Gerald Vizenor and Ohio State University Professor Chadwick Allen to refer to the ways in which indigenous authors use their texts as “a means of cultural survival that comes with denying authoritative representations of [indigenous peoples] in addition to developing an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65). I argue that acts of Māori cultural survivance are manifested in the works of these three authors both internally, in terms of the actions of characters in their fictional narratives, and externally, by the authors themselves who fight for survivance in a literary publishing world that is often slow to recognize and value works of fiction that challenge traditional (Western) modes of novel form and style. Thesis chapters therefore include both extensive critical readings of Grace’s novel Dogside Story (2001), Morris’s novels Queen of Beauty (2002) and Hibiscus Coast (2005), and Morey’s novel Bloom (2003) as well as detailed biographical information based on my interviews with the authors themselves. The thesis emphasizes the ways in which each woman’s approach to writing survivance fiction is largely driven by her personal history and whakapapa. The study also asserts that Grace, Morris and Morey are producing acts of indigenous literary cultural survivance that “imagine the world healthy,” something author and critic Maxine Hong Kingston demands that contemporary writers of critical fictions must do if they are going to convince the book-buying populace “not to worship tragedy as the highest art anymore” (204). Grace, Morris, and Morey depict the creative, generative, and “healthy” aspects of Māori cultural survivance as taking place in both the real and imagined communities which they live in and write about. Their texts offer hope for the ongoing survival – and survivance – of Māori culture in the twenty-first century.