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Title: Literary Recession: New Zealand Fiction, 1985-Mid 1986 (Part I: SURVEYS 1985-86)
Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
Release Date : January 01, 1987
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 211 KB

Description

Reading Lawrence Jones's comments in JNZL/3 on the year 1983-84 in New Zealand fiction with the task of reviewing the following eighteen months in mind is rather like looking back over financial reports in the months prior to the 1987 stock market crash. Who would have thought amid all those deals, mergers, new flotations and gearings up of the great bull market that a massive slump was just around the corner? Who would have guessed that following a year which saw the publication of the bonepeople and All Visitors Ashore so many forgettable novels would be published in the space of a year and a half? Although one or two novels valiantly resisted the bearish trend, of no novel published in 1985 could one say, as Jones says of the novels by Stead and Hulme, that they are likely to be remembered as long as Owls Do Cry and The God Boy, the highlights of that annus mirabilis 1957-58. Yet the first half of 1986 saw a sudden, if unspectacular, resurgence of the literary bull market with the appearance of Patricia Grace's Potiki and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch. In the following six months to December 1986 the bull rose to unprecedented heights. Major new novels by Stead, Ian Wedde and Maurice Shadbolt appeared together with significant ones by Russell Haley and Mike Johnson. Even the minor novels of this periodby Marilyn Duckworth, Peter Hooper, Sue McAuley, James McNeish and Elizabeth Smither--constitute a demi-annus mirabilis of their own. My task here, then, is to chart the depths of the slump (noting the minor rallies) and to trace the beginnings of the recovery.