Dan Davin's Southland Stories
Edited by Janet Wilson
The book
Dan Davin, one of New Zealand's acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1913. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family in Southland.
Comic, haunting, poetic, profound and lyrical, the stories have a regional flavour quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of a close-knit rural community and its post-British social relationships and tribulations, with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton or Marshall. The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.
The author
DAN DAVIN was a New Zealand Rhodes scholar who became Academic Publisher at the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Throughout his career, in his spare time, he wrote both fiction and works of memoir, from his war novel For the Rest of Their Lives (1947) and Southland novels Roads from Home (1949) and No Remittance (1959) to his collection of war stories The Salamander and the Fire (1986).
The editor
JANET WILSON is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, and formerly taught at the University of Otago. She has published widely on New Zealand postcolonial/diaspora writers such as Dan Davin, Fleur Adcock and Katherine Mansfield, and has an interest in globalisation and the short story and cosmopolitan war fictions. She recently coedited Katherine Mansfield: New directions (2019). She edits the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and convenes the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network.
Publication details
Hardback 138 x 210mm, 304 pp
ISBN 9781877372421 $45
2007