Floating worlds
Subtitle: essays on contemporary New Zealand fiction
By: edited by Anna Jackson and Jane Stafford.
Contributors: Jackson, Anna, 1967-; Stafford, Jane, 1951-
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Wellington, N.Z
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780864736017
Subjects: New Zealand fiction -- History and criticism
Description: "The ground-breaking New Zealand fiction of the last fifteen years has not attracted critical commentary beyond initial reviews, despite its success with readers both local and international, and despite its attracting major awards both local and international. Floating Worlds contains stimulating and insightful essays on eight of the best novels of recent years. These are novels in which there is no longer one authoritative way to tell a story. In contrast to Allen Curnows stricture that New Zealand writers should conform to the disciplines of an uncompromising fidelity to experience, of an unqualified responsibility to the truths of themselves, in this place and that time, these novels invite us into what Paula Morris calls a floating world, where identities are negotiable and performative. Floating Worlds illuminates the distinctive ways in which contemporary New Zealand writing approaches the relationship between the real and the imaginary, and the different kinds of challenging, edgy authenticities that operate in the space between them: the familiar and the foreign; the copy and the original; the fake and the genuine; the intention and the act, including the act of writing."--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-189).