Jane Stafford

"Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 argues that glib dismissals of the past do disservice to the present, seeing in the writing of Maoriland something more complex and more diverse: the beginnings of a self-consciously New Zealand literature which, adapts European literary forms to the new place."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is the first study of writers who are both Victorian and indigenous, who have been educated in and write in terms of Victorian literary conventions, but whose indigenous affiliation is part of their literary personae and subject matter. What happens when the colonised, indigenous, or 'native' subject learns to write in the literary language of empire? If the romanticised subject of colonial literature becomes the author, is a new kind of writing produced, or does the native author conform to the models of the coloniser? By investigating the ways that nineteenth-century concerns are adopted, accommodated, rewritten, challenged, re-inscribed, confronted, or assimilated in the work of these authors, this study presents a novel examination of the nature of colonial literary production and indigenous authorship, as well as suggesting to the discipline of colonial and postcolonial studies a perhaps unsettling perspective with which to look at the larger patterns of Victorian cultural and literary formation.

This is the first single-volume collection of Aotearoa's major writing, from early exploration and encounter to a globalised, multicultural present. In fiction and non-fiction, letters and speeches, stories and songs, the editors unearth the diverse voices of the New Zealand imagination. And for years to come this anthology will be our guide to what's worth reading--and why.