Colonial New Zealand literature in the global marketplace: Then and now

ABSTRACT

Contemporary commentators frequently portrayed 19th-century New Zealand as the most British colony. Indeed, the majority of settlers came from the British Isles and actively sought to replicate a British way of life on the so-called periphery of empire. A defining element in the construction of colonial culture was the continued participation in anglophone print culture through reading and writing. Until recently, colonial New Zealand writing has been dismissed as a minor variant of English literature that included nothing significant about the place it was produced in and, instead, relied on conventions imported from Europe. Only in the last two decades have revisionist critics reinvigorated the discussion of early New Zealand writing. This article reviews the complicated emplacement of colonial New Zealand literature by discussing its critical reception as well as its national and international publishing trajectories, and how these have problematized the conception of an early “national” canon of New Zealand literature.

KEYWORDS:

• New Zealand
• 19th-century literature
• cultural nationalism
• literary history
• book trade
• digitization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In The Long Forgetting: Post-Colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand, Evans (2007) has modified his stance to one that is more inclusive of colonial authors.

2. For more details on newspapers and literary culture in colonial New Zealand, see Rudig (2014).

3. The capitalized “Home” designates British-based notions of home, as the 19th-century Pākehā population constructed their sense of belonging to a place in a country over 10,000 miles away – exemplified by Alan [1927] 1934 visit to Mother England in his Home: A Colonial’s Adventure.

4. British firms, however, continued to dominate New Zealand book culture well into the 1970s (see Trainor 1997, 113).

5. For this reason, “scholars distant from world centres of book production often call themselves students of print culture rather than book historians, the term preferred in Great Britain and France” (Maslen 2008, 133).

6. Helen Bones (2015) questions the inevitability of literary expatriation, arguing that colonial expansion gave writers removed from centres of book production access to international cultural infrastructures, which allowed them to participate in literary communities such as those in London regardless of their physical distance (864).

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Notes on contributors

Stefanie Herades

Stefanie Herades is senior lecturer in English at MCI (Management Centre Innsbruck), Austria. She is a Victorianist by training and inclination with a special interest in migration studies. In her PhD thesis, she analysed fiction by 19th-century migrant women writers in New Zealand. She has also published on book history, Canadian literature, Mary Taylor and Katherine Mansfield.