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The literature of Maoriland, as New Zealand was popularly known from the 1880s to the beginning of the First World War, remains the ‘black hole’ in New Zealand’s literary memory.
In the 1930s Allen Curnow and Denis Glover associated the Maoriland writers with sentiment, gentility and colonial deference. Today, Maoriland evokes a world of saccharine fantasy in which Maori warriors in heroic attitudes and Maori maidens in seductive ones inhabited outmoded Victorian literary forms, while at the same time the business of settlement sidelined and dispossessed actual Maori.
Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872–1914 argues that such glib dismissals of the past do disservice to the present, seeing in the writing of Maoriland something more complex and more diverse: the beginnings of a self-consciously New Zealand literature, which adapts European literary forms to the new place. In this period are the origins of much of New
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