Nurse to the Imagination
Fifty Years of the Burns Fellowship
Key Points
• Based at the University of Otago, this is NZ’s oldest literary fellowship.
• Offers a glimpse and samples of five decades of NZ writers and writing.
• Illustrated with photographs by Reg Graham.
The Book
This book illustrates the contribution made to New Zealand letters by our oldest and most prestigious literary fellowship.
Edited and introduced by Professor Lawrence Jones, the anthology, by turns playful and serious, celebrates the Fellowship’s golden jubilee.
Beginning with novelist Ian Cross in 1959 and ending with the 2008 Burns Fellow, poet Sue Wootton, Nurse to the Imagination showcases the output of leading New Zealand literary figures such as James K. Baxter, Michael King and Janet Frame alongside newer voices, with pieces written at the time of the Fellow’s tenure. There are lots of interesting trends here, of which the shift from male-dominated literature up to 1980 to the rich representation of women writers since then is just one.
Review Quotes
‘… what a great reference book for all students of NZ’s literary history. Every secondary school, university and public library in the land should have multiple copies.’ – Beatties Bookblog, 12 November 2008
'This substantial volume, with its revelatory portraits of each fellow, becomes a worthy guide to the matters and manners of a half-century of work by some (not all) of our finest writers. Jones notes that women writers have increasingly become Fellows in later years.' – Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 March 2009
Contents
The Burns Fellowship: ‘To encourage and promote’
The 1960s
The 1970s
The 1980s
The 1990s
The 2000s
Notes
Acknowledgements
Illustration Sources
Editor
Lawrence Jones is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Otago, has taught at the University for 45 years of the 50 years of the Fellowship. He introduced the first papers in New Zealand literature at the University and has published extensively on New Zealand literature and its history, including the section on the novel in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1998) and Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932–1945 (2003). He was editor and co-editor of the Journal of New Zealand Literature 1990-2000 and was co-editor of From the Mainland: An Anthology of South Island Writing (1995).
Literature, Cultural Studies
Paperback, 240 x 210 mm, 256 pp , illustrated
ISBN 978 1 877372 65 0, $45
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