The Ship of Dreams
Masculinity in contemporary Pakeha and Maori fiction of Aotearoa/New Zealand
Key Points
• Outstanding critical assessment of major NZ Pakeha and Maori writers
• Extensive insights into masculinity and child-parent relationships
• For general readers as well as students of literature
Book
The first critical study to investigate at length how masculine subjectivities are represented in contemporary New Zealand fiction.
Notoriously self-contained and private, Kiwi men are often reluctant to talk about their personal feelings and embarrassed at the thought that any private emotional difficulties could be exposed to critical examination. One must go to their imaginative literature to make contact with the reality that underlies the (often calculatedly deceptive) surface.
In his investigation of these issues, Fox demonstrates the crucial importance of Pakeha and Maori cultural predispositions influencing masculine identity in this country – often at the cost of great psychic pain for the men involved.
Review Quotes
'It is a thoughtful and erudite work and sets an interesting new direction in the study of New Zealand literature.'
– NZ Books
'The real interest in The Ship of Dreams surely lies in the author's examination of the Maori-inflected text of Witi Ihimaera and Alan Duff, for ... Alistair Fox explores how the problems within New Zealand male culture reside in psychological damage inflicted by behaviours of parents that spring from aspects of Pakeha and Maori cultural legacies.' – Journal of Pacific History, 44: 3.
Contents
Introduction 1 Reworking the Archetypes: Maurice Gee’s Early Novels
2 Maurice Gee’s In My Father’s Den and the Paradigm of Puritan Repression 3 ‘The Hand of Grandfather on the Family’: Maurice Gee’s Plumb Trilogy 4 The Inward Man: Maurice Gee’s Games of Choice, Prowlers, and Going West. 5 Psychic Retreats and Homicidal Violence: Maurice Gee’s The Burning Boy, Crime Story, Loving Ways, and Blindsight 6 A Baby-Boomer Reports on Experience: Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s Oracles and Miracles Trilogy and Shanghai Boy
7 ‘A Price to Pay’: Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch 8 Articulating the Subjectivities of the Divided Self: Witi Ihimaera’s The Dream Swimmer 9 The Dilemma of the Mäori New Man: Inter-generational Conflict in The Matriarch, Bulibasha, The Whale Rider, and The Uncle’s Story
10 Sexuality, Masculinity, and Indigenous Identity in Ihimaera’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and The Uncle’s Story 11 The Effects of the ‘Bad Mother’ in the Fiction of Alan Duff: Both Sides of the Moon, One Night Out Stealing, and the Heke Trilogy
Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Author
Alistair Fox is Professor of English at the University of Otago. An internationally recognised Renaissance scholar, his past publications include the English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Blackwell, 1997), Reassessing the Henrician Age: Politics and Reform 1500–1550 (Blackwell, 1986) and Thomas More: History and Providence (Yale, 1983). More recently, Professor Fox has been writing on contemporary New Zealand culture, with The Ship of Dreams being his first book-length foray into the field of New Zealand literature.
Literature, Criticism
paperback, 192 pp approx
illutsrated cover only
ISBN 978 1 877372 54 4
$45.00 approx
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