The aim of this thesis is to assess the reason why Katherine Mansfield’s reputation in France has always been greater than in England. The thesis examines the ways in which the French reception of Mansfield has idealised her persona to the extent of crafting a hagiography. I ask: what were the motives behind the French critics’ desire to put Mansfield on a pedestal? How did the three years she spent on French soil influence her writing? How do the translations of her work collude in the myth surrounding her personality? Although several other scholars have discussed the Katherine Mansfield myth in France, this thesis is the first sustained attempt to establish interconnections between her own French influences (literary and otherwise), and the mythmaking of the French critics and translators. I have divided my thesis into six chapters. The first places Mansfield in the general literary context of her era, exploring French literary tendencies at the time and juxtaposing them with the main literary trends in England. The second chapter focuses on the writer’s trips to France, demonstrating the influence of the French experience on her life and works. The third chapter highlights specific French literary influences and how these manifest themselves in her narrative art. In the fourth, I explain the workings of the writer’s narrative art, so that when in the next chapter I study the translations via close textual analysis, it will become clear whether the beliefs and principles expressed in the original texts have been diluted during the translation process. The last chapter prior to the conclusion will follow the critical appraisal of her life and work in France from her death up to the present day, by closely analysing the differing French critical responses. The division of the thesis in this way will enable me to show how these various strands combine to create a legend which has little basis in fact, thereby demonstrating how reception and translation determine the importance of an author’s reputation in the literary world.

Focusing on four novels by Janet Frame in dialogue with texts by Freud, Zizek, Lacan, and Silverman, my project theorizes trauma as the basis for both an ethical and an interpretive practice. Frame's fiction develops a cultural psychology, showing how the factors of narcissistic fantasy and the incapacity to mourn contribute to physical and epistemic aggression committed along divides of ethnicity, gender, and linguistic mode of expression. Employing trauma as a figure for an absolute limit to what can be remembered or known, I suggest that reconciliation with whatever is inaccessible, lacking, or dead within an individual or collective self fosters a non-violent relation with others. I begin by querying the place of "catharsis" within hermeneutic literary interpretation, focusing on the construction of Frame within the New Zealand literary industry. With Erlene's adamantine silence at its centre, Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964) rejects the hermeneutic endeavour, exemplified by Patrick Evans' critical work on Frame, to make a text "speak" its secrets. My readings of Intensive Care (1970) and The Adaptable Man (1965) address inter-generational repetitions of violence as the consequences of the failure to recognise and work through the devastations of war. The masculine fantasy of totality driving the Human Delineation project in Intensive Care has a linguistic corollary in Colin Monk's pursuit of the Platonic ideality of algebra, set against Milly's "degraded" punning writing. In The Adaptable Man, the arrival of electricity ushers in a new perceptual rgime that would obliterate any "shadow" of dialectical negativity or internal difference. The thesis ends with a swing toward conciliation and emotional growth. The homosexual relationship depicted in Daughter Buffalo (1972) offers a model of transference, defined as a transitional, productive form of repetition that opens Talbot to his ethnic and familial inheritance. Working from within a radical form of narcissism, the novel reformulates masculinity by embracing loss as "phallic divestiture" (Kaja Silverman)

From the late 1970s, New Zealand women short story writers increasingly worked their way into the literary mainstream. In the wake of the early, feminist-motivated years of the decade their gender, which had previously been the root of their marginalized position, began to work for them. However, rather than embracing womanhood, this growth in gender recognition led to many writers rejecting overt identification of their sex. To be a labeled a woman writer was considered patronising, a mark of inferiority. These women wanted to be known as writers only, some even expressing a hope for literature to reach a point of androgyny. Their work, however, did not convey an androgynous perspective. Just as the fact of their gender could not be avoided, so the influence their sex had on their creativity cannot be denied. Gender does matter and New Zealand women's short fiction published in the 1975-1995 period illustrates its significance. From the early trend for adopting fiction as a site for social commentary and political treatise against patriarchy's one-dimensional image of woman, these stories show a gradually increasing awareness of fictional possibilities, allowing for celebration of the multiplicity of female experience and capturing a process of redefinition rather than rejection of 'women's work'. Though in the later 1990s it may no longer have been politically 'necessary' to promote women's work on the grounds of gender, on a personal level the 'difference of view' of the woman writer remained both visible and vital. An increasing sense of woman-to-woman communication based on shared experience emerges: women are writing as women, about women, for women.

<p>This dissertation argues that the literary, intellectual, and cultural borders of Victorian Britain extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, and that the tradition of nation-based literary criticism inherited from the Victorians has blinded Victorian Studies to that possibility. Building upon the nineteenth century concept of "Greater Britain," a term invoking the expansion of the British nation through settler colonization, I demonstrate that literary forms did not simply diffuse from the core to the periphery of the empire, but instead were able to circulate within the space of Greater Britain. That process of circulation shaped Victorian literature and culture, as local colonial circumstances led writers to modify literary forms and knowledge formations; those modifications were then able to be further disseminated through the empire by way of the networks that constituted Greater Britain.</p><p>My argument focuses on the novel, because its formal allegiance to the imagined national community made it a valuable testing ground for the multi-centered nation that was being formed by settlement. I specifically locate the Victorian novel in the context of Britain's relations with the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, which were unique in that their transition from initial settlement to independent nations occurred almost entirely during the Victorian period. The chapters of <italic>Unsettled Nation</italic> focus on realism, romance and political economy's interest in settlement; the bildungsroman and theories of discipline developed in the penal colonies; the theorization of imperial spatiality in utopian and invasion fiction; and the legacy of the Waverley novel in the portrayal of colonization in temporal terms. Each chapter presents a specific example of how knowledge formations and literary forms were modified as a result of their circulation through the archipelagic nation space of Greater Britain.</p><p>Working at the intersection between Victorian Studies and Australian and New Zealand literary criticism, I seek to recover and reconsider the geographical mobility of nineteenth century Britons and their literature. Thus, more than merely trying to cast light on a dimension of imperialism largely ignored by critics of Victorian literature, I use the specific example of Australasia to make the broader claim that the very idea of Victorian Britain can and must be profitably expanded to include its settler colonies.</p> / Dissertation

Although nature is a dominant presence both in historical New Zealand literature and in New Zealand's current international image, literary critics observe a tendency on the part of young writers to neglect nature in favour of more human, urban and cultural themes. I write against this perception, basing my argument on the hypothesis that such urban-based literature may in fact be centrally concerned with the natural world and with human-nature relations. In locating nature within the urban fictional environment, I demonstrate a model of analysis that extends literary critical approaches to nature both within New Zealand literature and within the field of ecocriticism, both of which are largely consumed with analysing representations of sublime, non-urban nature. I test this urban ecocritical method of reading in my analysis of Catherine Chidgey's three novels, In a Fishbone Church, Golden Deeds and The Transformation, all of which adhere to the human-centred trend typical of contemporary New Zealand novels. I reveal within Chidgey's fiction a gradual progression away from archetypal representations of the sublime toward a more complex, fractured and rebellious variety of nature that co-exists alongside humans within urban space. Thus, while the characters in her first novel predominantly interact with nature as a sublime, non-urban entity, those in her second and third novels face the daily possibility of encountering "the wild" within domesticated settings that are apparently severed from any connection with the natural world. This kind of urbanised feral nature poses a significant threat to Chidgey's characters, overtly in the form of the powerful natural elements, and covertly through the myriad varieties of transformed nature with which they surround themselves. I read this portrayal of nature as a commentary on contemporary modernity's relationship with the natural environment, and I suggest that this kind of agentive, autonomous nature demands a new theory of environmentalism which will consider nature as an actor alongside humans.

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.

In the thirties and forties politics and public themes bore in upon writers influencing what they wrote about, the forms they chose and their conception of their function in society. It is a period in which writers sought to make literature serve the larger political end and often artistic merit is a function of the success the writer had in accommodating in his work the demands of outside pressures. It is always difficult to detach a period of history from the longer continuum but there is, nevertheless, a case to be made for viewing the years from about 1930 to around 1950 as a relatively homogeneous unit in New Zealand's literary history, distinct in important respects from what came before and from what followed. The new generation of writers in England in the thirties, particularly Auden and the group around him influenced young New Zealand writers both technically and in the attitudes they adopted to the relationship between the artist and society. The prevailing left-wing ethos emphasised the political and public responsibilities of the writer. Retreat into private, esoteric, literary modes was seen as an abdication of these responsibilities. The major themes of this period in New Zealand writing were social realism and nationalism; the literary products of the pressures exerted by political and economic forces. For the young writers the political awareness and sense of social commitment generated by the depression, together with the crusade to inhabit the land imaginatively, provided a sense of literary direction. These writers and their contemporaries accepted responsibility in both these areas seeing themselves as crusaders for social justice and creators of the imaginative understanding necessary to achieve a sense of belonging to this country. Such an understanding would be reached not through seeing it as offspring of England, nor as a picturesque, innocent new society; but by exploring it honestly and creating the terms and vocabulary for describing it. This study documents the careers of John Mulgan, Frank Sargeson, R.A.K. Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn and Allen Curnow in the period, roughly, 1930 to 1950, and looks at the ways each responded to the public demands they perceived were placed upon them. In their different ways these writers went about the business of changing New Zealand society, broadening its understanding of itself, creating an atmosphere conducive to artistic and literary development. Despite the fact that the degree of success in accommodating these demands varies considerably from writer to writer, the literary output of the period as a whole generated the confidence and energy that were a prerequisite to the development of an indigenous literature. During this period there developed an acceptance, albeit highly critical, of New Zealand and a feeling that the tradition which had been established in the thirties and forties could be extended by succeeding generations of artists and writers.

This thesis examines contemporary interpretations of a selection of important texts written by New Zealand women between 1910 and 1940, and also a film and film script written more recently (which are considered as re-readings of a novel by Mander). The thesis argues that, though reading or meaning-making is always an activity of construction there will, at any given moment, always be reasons for preferring one way of reading over another-a reading most appropriate to a situation or circumstances. This study is motivated by a desire to understand how literary criticism has changed in recent years, particularly under the influence of feminism, and how a reader today can make a choice among competing methods of interpretation. Comparisons are drawn between various possible readings of the texts in order to classify methods of reading, particularly nationalist and feminist reading strategies. The over-all tendency of the argument is to propose a more self-critical and self-conscious approach to reading, and to develop a materialist and historical approach which I see as particularly important to the New Zealand context in the 1990s. / Thesis is now published as a book. Paul M. (1999) Her Side of the Story: readings of Mander, Mansfield and Hyde. Dunedin: Otago University Press. http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/ for more information.

This thesis explores the topic of literature-into-film adaptation by investigating the use of New Zealand fiction by film-makers in this country. It attempts this task primarily by examining eight case-studies of the adaptation process: five features designed for cinema release (Sleeping Dogs, A State of Siege, Sons for the Return Home, The Scarecrow and Other Halves), one feature-length television drama (the God Boy), and two thirty-minute television dramas (The Woman at the Store and Big Brother, Little Sister, from the series Winners and Losers). All eight had their first screenings in the ten-year period 1975-1985. For each of the case-studies, the following aspects are investigated: the original work of fiction, a practical history of the adaptation process (including interviews with people involved), and a study of changes made during the scripting and shooting stages. The films are analysed in detail, with a focus on visual and auditory style, in particular how these handle the themes, characterisation and style of the original works. Comparisons are made of the structures of the novels and the films. For each film, an especially close reading is offered of sample scenes (frequently the opening and closing scenes). The thesis is illustrated with still photographs – in effect, quotations from key moments – and these provide a focus to aspects of the discussion. Where individual adaptation problems existed in particular case-studies (for example, the challenge of the first-person narration of The God Boy), these are examined in detail. The interaction of both novels and films with the society around them is given emphasis, and the films are placed in their cultural and economic context - and in the context of general film history. For each film, the complex reception they gained from different groups (for example, reviewers, ethnic groups, gender groups, the authors of the original works) is discussed. All the aspects outlined above demonstrate the complexity of the responses made by New Zealand film-makers to the pressure and challenges of adaptation. They indicate the different answers they gave to the questions raised by the adaptation process in a new national cinema, and reveal their individual achievements. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

This thesis is an investigation of writing by New Zealand children in the Children's Pages of five New Zealand newspapers: the New Zealand Herald, Christchurch Press and Otago Daily Times in the 1930s and 1980s, the Dominion in the 1930s; and the Wellington Evening Post in the 1980s. Its purpose is to show how children reflected their world, interacted with editors, and interpreted the adult world in published writing, and to examine continuities and changes between the 1930s and 1980s. It seeks evidence of gender variations in writing. and explores the circumstances in which the social role of writing was established by young writers. It considers the ways in which children (especially girls) consciously and unconsciously used public writing to create a public place for themselves. It compares major themes chosen by children, their topic and genre preferences in writing, and the gender and age differences evident in these preferences. The thesis is organised into three Parts, with an Introduction discussing the scholarly background to the issues it explores, and its methodology. Part One contains two chapters examining the format and tone of each Children's Page. And the role and influence of their Editors. Part Two (also of two chapters) investigates the origins and motivations of the young contributors, with a special focus on the Otago Daily Times as a community newspaper. Part Three. of four chapters, explores the children's writing itself, in separate chapters on younger and older children, and a chapter on the most popular genre, poetry. The conclusion suggests further areas of research, and points to the implications of the findings of the thesis for social history in New Zealand and for classroom practice. The thesis contains a Bibliography and an Appendix with a selection of writings by Janet Frame and her family to the Otago Daily Times Children's Page in the 1930s. / Note: Whole document restricted at the request of the author, but available by individual request, use the feedback form to request access.