Author(s): Roger Robinson

New Zealand Literature | Reference

This companion seeks to offer a comprehensive record of New Zealand writing in an easily accessible form. It contains more than 1500 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, novels, plays, poetry, journals, periodicals, anthologies, literary movements and professional organizations. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature offers a comprehensive record of New Zealand writing in easily accessible form. It contains more than 1500 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, novels, plays, poetry, journals, periodicals, anthologies, literary movements, and professional organizations. Its broad scope extends from pre-European Maori oral forms to work across all forms of writing in the late 1990s. Detailed biographies examine the careers and contributions of notable New Zealand writers, while longer entries on such themes as art in New Zealand literature, the Depression, gold-mining, landscape, science fiction, and war and literature provide a strong structural underpinning to the work. The generous range of plot summaries and author entries will prove invaluable to students and all readers with an interest in New Zealand and its literature. The Companion extends beyond the major traditional fields of fiction to provide generous treatment of New Zealand's children's literature, popular fiction, and other forms, including journals, music lyrics, and television drama. The sister arts are also treated in some detail, with entries on composers who have drawn on literary texts and artists whose work relates significantly to New Zealand literary consciousness. National entries examine the literary links with such countries as the USA, Ireland, and Japan. Exhaustive in its scope and wealth of detail, and rich in its interweaving of social, political, ethnic, and literary themes, the Companion is the culmination of more than five years' meticulous preparation. The two editors, experts across a variety of literary and related fiends, have worked with more than ninety contributors. The Companion contains much original research and brings together a range of information never before available in one place, including much that is not easily accessible elsewhere. A work of this scale will provide an extraordinarily useful quarry of information, ideas, and insights for both the general reader and the scholar. It will be essential for anyone interested in the detail and uniqueness of a developing national configuration, and for everyone concerned with New Zealand and the words by which it is identified. In The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature the editors have drawn on the expertise of more than ninety contributors.