C.K. Stead, poet, fiction-writer, and Professor of English in the University of Auckland, is also a leading literary critic: The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot, first published in 1964, has become a standard text on the subject. Now Stead has gathered together essays, short and long, beginning with one from 1957 – ‘Charles Brasch: A Lack of Umbrellas’ – and including the important ‘Preliminary: From Wystan to Carlos – Modern and Modernism in Recent New Zealand Poetry’, in In The Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand literature (Auckland University Press, Oxford University Press, 1981). It is a stimulating and provocative collection, a pleasure to read both for his illuminating views on authors and texts – Stead’s aesthetic judgement seldom leads him astray – and for the stylish way in which they are expressed.

Another selection of critical writings is that of Charles Brasch, poet and editor of Landfall from its foundation in 1947 until the end of 1966. In the practical criticism involved in the editorship of the quarterly journal, Brasch made a decisive impression on the nature of New Zealand literature of the period. The Universal Dance (University of Otago Press, 1981) is a selection of his essays and lectures edited by J.L. Watson, and by reference both to theory and example they illustrate the international and ideal standards by which Brasch measured cultural excellence. The book opens with its most important piece, a lecture entitled ‘Present Company’ which was given to the Auckland Gallery Associates in 1965, and first published in 1966.

Partly as a consequence of Stead’s essay ‘From Wystan to Carlos’, poetic theory has become something of an issue in New Zealand’s literary circles. Alistair Paterson, poet and editor, has joined the debate with his monograph The New Poetry: Considerations towards Open Form (Pilgrims South Press, 1981), which has itself been mildly controversial. It is one of the few studies of any length on a theoretical aspect of New Zealand literature, and is a useful adjunct to 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets, edited by Paterson in 1980.

A good account of the development and present condition of short fiction here is given in Critical Essays on the New Zealand Short Story (Heinemann, 1982) edited by Cherry Hankin. Besides Hankin’s own contribution on Katherine Mansfield, there are eight essays, including a pair on Frank Sargeson, Lawrence Jones’s on ‘Gaskell, Middleton and the Sargeson Tradition’, Dan Davin’s on Maurice Duggan, and Bill Pearson’s on Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Both Oxford and Longman Paul have been producing a series of monographs on New Zealand authors, aimed retrospectively at the tertiary and the secondary level markets. The longer established is Oxford’s New Zealand Writers and their Work Series which now have a dozen titles. The most recent of these have been Alan Roddick’s Allen Curnow, Margaret Dalziel’s Janet Frame (both 1980), Peter Simpson’s Ronald Hugh Morrieson (1982), and James Bertram’s Dan Davin (1983). James K. Baxter by Vincent O’Sullivan was reprinted in 1982. These all achieve a high standard of critical evaluation; there is a feeling however that Morrieson has been elbowed into this august company, while another view suggests that his presence there has saved the series from dying on its feet.

Longman Paul’s introductory series was initiated under the general editorship of Peter Smart, who also provided Introducing Sam Hunt (1981), and Introducing Alistair Campbell (1982). Others so far are David Hill’s Maurice Gee (1981), Elizabeth Caffin’s Katherine Mansfield and David Dowling’s Bruce Mason (both 1982). This series aims to be less academic in tone and more concerned to offer a portrait of the writer’s life as well as his art: this ideal is best expressed in the general editor’s own two contributions. The series is appealingly produced with bright covers and good selections of photographic plates, and is sure to appeal to a wide group of interested readers.

In turning from writing about writing to authors writing about their lives, greatest interest has been aroused by the recent publication of the first volume of Janet Frame’s autobiography, To the Is-Land (The Woman’s Press, with the Hutchinson Group [NZ], 1983). It tells of her childhood and adolescence in Oamaru up until the time of her departure for the Dunedin Teachers’ College, in vivid and evocative detail. Besides having enormous interest on its own account, it gives a valuable insight into the background of Frame’s early short stories and novels.

An account of an Otagoan upbringing a generation earlier and an economic world away from Frame’s is given in Charles Brasch’s Indirections: A Memoir 1909–1947 (OUP, 1980). These years of indecision for Brasch – whether to live in Europe or New Zealand, whether to follow the family’s business traditions, or turn to art – came to an end in 1947 when he plumped for New Zealand, established Landfall, and expended an enormous amount of energy in the encouragement of New Zealand letters.

Frank Sargeson was another writer of Brasch’s generation; as it is made clear in the selections of critical essays on the short story mentioned above, Sargeson was the seminal figure in the establishment of a distinctive tradition of short story writing in New Zealand. He wrote three volumes of autobiography – Once is Enough, Never Enough, and More than Enough – which, after his death, have been collected together as Sargeson (Penguin, 1981). It is as remarkable a work in its own right as the fiction on which he established his reputation.

Besides these, Denis Glover and Sylvia Ashton-Warner have also produced memoirs. Denis Glover’s is in the form of an addition to an earlier piece, and becomes Hot Water Sailor and Landlubber Ho (Collins, 1981), while Ashton-Warner’s is a long work called Passed This Way (Reed, 1980) where the expatriate writer acknowledges the importance to her of the physical environment of ‘these islands’, but rejects the national characteristics she perceives in its inhabitants.

Others besides writers have recently published accounts of their New Zealand experience. Toss Woollaston paints a lively picture of the young artist growing up in, and breaking out of, a rather straight-laced household in Sage Tea (Collins, 1980); Ormon Wilson in An Outsider Looks Back (Port Nicholson press, 1982) tells how, although born to a privileged Canterbury family, he obtained a position in a Labour cabinet, among other achievements Francis Bennett’s A Canterbury Tale (OUP, 1980) is the story of a medical practitioner written with such perception that it widens into a valuable social history; Elsie Locke relates her experience of being a young woman enrolled among the predominantly male population of Auckland University College in Student at the Gates (Whitcoulls, 1981); and Mervyn Thompson casts himself in roles from West Coast coalminer, to academic, to actor, to director, to playwright, in All My Lives (Whitcoulls, 1980).

The writing about other people’s lives has produced three major biographies. E.H. McCormick’s A Portrait of Frances Hodgkins (AUP, OUP, 1981) won New Zealand Book Awards in 1982 both for book production and for design work by Neysa Moss. It is a splendid book in other ways too, and displays an integrity towards its subject that would be expected from McCormick.

Patricia Burns makes a reconsideration of both a great Māori, and also early Māori–Pakeha relations, in her substantial Te Rauparaha: A New Perspective (Reed, 1980).

However, it is already apparent that in the field of biographical history R.C.J. Stone’s Young Logan Campbell (AUP, OUP, 1982) is a landmark. Campbell was the author of Poenamo: Sketches of the early days in New Zealand (1881); he also, in the course of living to the age of ninety-four, became known as the ‘Father of Auckland’. In this first of a projected two volume treatment of Campbell, Stone takes us through to is fortieth year, and reveals a life rather different from that offered autobiographically in the classic Poenamo. The greatest achievements of this Edinburgh-born businessman took place during these early years, especially the establishment of the pioneer merchant-firm of Brown and Campbell. But this book is also a portrait of early Auckland, an account of the early days of a town that was to grow into the commercial capital of New Zealand. A biography which is well-established as a standard is Antony Alpers’s A Life of Katherine Mansfield; in 1982 it was reprinted as an OUP paperback.

In the area of general history, the most important publication has been The Oxford History of New Zealand (The Clarendon Press, OUP, 1981). Edited by W.H. Oliver this is a collection of sixteen essays divided into four parts which are entitled ‘Beginnings’, ‘Growth and Conflict’, ‘A Time of Transition’, and ‘Precarious Maturity’. That is, the underlying structure is chronological. Within this format the different writers present detailed thematic analyses of our social history. It is not a ‘single personal vision of the New Zealand past’, but rather a collection of many viewpoints presenting different interpretations of sometimes the same events. Oliver himself provides the final chapter, ‘The Awakening Imagination’ on the development of New Zealand’s cultural history from the breakthrough achieved after World War II.

There have been a number of successful publications dealing with specific historical topics. Rollo Arnold’s The Farthest Promised Land (VUP, 1981) is a detailed study of the immigration patterns that emerged in the process of moving from English villages to New Zealand during the 1870s. Stevan Eldred-Grigg has written two books on provincial history: they are A Southern Gentry: New Zealanders who inherited the Earth (Reed, 1980). and A New History of Canterbury (Mclndoe, 1982). The new ground broken and the re-evaluations made in these histories is bound to instigate further work. Both are produced with plates.

Three other well-illustrated histories that deal with specific themes are Women in New Zealand Society (George Allen and Unwin, 1980), edited by Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes; a study of the Waihi Strike of 1912 by Stanley Roche called The Red and the Gold (OUP, 1982) in which the introductory chapters are of particular interest; and Toil and Trouble: The struggle for a better New Zealand (Methuen, 1981) by Bert Roth and Janny Hammond.

Keith Sinclair has excited a good deal of interest with his History of the University of Auckland (AUP, OUP, 1983), which was commissioned to celebrate that university’s centenary. His historian’s skills coupled with a long personal acquaintance makes this a highly readable and revealing account of an institution and the people who controlled it, or were controlled by it.

There have been a number of reprints of standard histories. Among these have been Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand (Penguin, 1980), the third edition of J.C. Beaglehole’s The Exploration of the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 1980), and Sir Peter Buck’s The Coming of the Maori (Whitcoulls, 1982) – the ninth printing of the second edition of this study.

Finally there are two other books that need to be mentioned in a survey of general prose literature recently published in New Zealand. Life in a Young Colony: Selections from early New Zealand writing (Whitcoulls, 1981) is a prose anthology edited by Cherry Hankin, and draws from a wide variety of sources to present the multifariousness of the experience of living in colonial New Zealand. The Letters of A.R.D. Fairburn (OUP, 1981), selected and edited by Lauris Edmond, reveals the private Fairburn behind the masks of poet and public commentator. His circle of correspondents was wide, and this book as a whole gives an essential insight into a period of New Zealand’s social history.