Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Hine-Ra, or The Māori Scout: A Romance of the New Zealand War.

THE NEW ZEALAND NOVEL

THE NEW ZEALAND NOVEL

Erin Mercer writes that colonial writing “is writing that is inextricable from, the processes of colonisation. That is not just because it is informed by the values and ideas of the colonial culture from which it sprang, but because that literature is itself a tool of colonisation” 6. Mercer argues that representation of Māori as primitive and savage helped to justify the colonial project, which sought to exploit the unknown. Stafford highlights that “Acclimatisation was a mid-nineteenth century obsession”7. Indeed, the colonial construction of New Zealand plays out in various ways in the literature of the nineteenth century. Authors of New Zealand fiction sought to construct a sense of a unique, unexplored New Zealand, whilst bringing with them the literary tone and traditions of European Victorian writing. Novelists explore a nostalgia for Europe whilst at the same time battling a desire to create a unique set of literary rules for fiction written about and in Aotearoa. Colonial writing often involved descriptions of the native New Zealanders as barbarians, and as the country as a rugged, unmapped and wild land in need of exploration. Curnow writes in in ‘The Unhistoric Story’ that the early New Zealand story from the colonial period of the 1800's is “something different, something / Nobody counted on” 8, something that explored the exoticness of a country with new cultures, peoples and landscapes.

Early New Zealand novelists sought to adapt the traditions of literature to the new setting, making conscious efforts to relocate the imagination to the new home. The voice of early colonists has not been given much attention, with nineteenth century literature largely ignored in favour of later writing. However, it is the early colonial novels such as Whitford’s which allowed for a development of New Zealand literature as a discourse separate from other colonial writing. Nineteenth-century New Zealand was a place richly provided with culture, and was the perfect backdrop for literature. There was a long-established Indigenous culture of Māori peoples from which Pākehā European writers had been appropriating to enhance their own writing experience. New Zealand was believed to have been an unsympathetic environment for anyone with literary ambition in the nineteenth century; Literary efforts for colonial New Zealand literature were often criticised as being derivative and British, rather than expressing a unique New Zealand culture. Efforts to establish a literary culture were often seen as appropriation of the indigenous culture, and the colony was seen as an unpromising place for potential writers. As well as this, there was not yet an established publishing house, meaning all literary efforts had to be produced overseas. However, despite its issues, in reality it was an advantage to be a New Zealand writer within the literary market of the nineteenth century. Writers were able to take advantage of the foreign appetite for the colonial exotic which was a staple within the colonial writing world. Foreign readers desired texts which highlighted the exoticness and excitement of the new colonies. The cult of the exotic was “tied up with the tropes of European romanticism" 9. British readers were particularly fascinated by tales of native races, something New Zealand writers could provide in abundance. Descriptions of Māori life and culture filled this fascination, and desire for romanticised stories of New Zealand grew. However, as the literary canon grew, many of the early works produced in New Zealand were forgotten or overlooked in favour of more modern writing, especially as the modernist era took over. Whitford’s text is a perfect example of this forgetfulness; a text which perfectly captures a picture of New Zealand at the time has been all but forgotten.