New Zealand literature

New Zealand literature

Introduction

      the body of literatures, both oral and written, produced in New Zealand.

Maori narrative: the oral tradition
      Like all Polynesian peoples, the Maori, who began to occupy the islands now called New Zealand about 1,000 years ago, composed, memorized, and performed laments, love poems, war chants, and prayers. They also developed a mythology to explain and record their own past and the legends of their gods and tribal heroes. As settlement developed through the 19th century, Europeans collected many of these poems and stories and copied them in the Maori language. The most picturesque myths and legends, translated into English and published in collections with titles like Maori Fairy Tales (1908; by Johannes Carl Andersen), were read to, or by, Pakeha (European) children, so that some—such as the legend of the lovers Hinemoa and Tutanekai or the exploits of the man-god Maui, who fished up the North Island from the sea and tamed the sun—became widely known among the population at large.

      Oratory on the marae (tribal meeting place), involving voice, facial expression, and gesture, was, and continues to be, an important part of Maori culture; it is difficult to make a clear distinction, such as exists in written literatures, between text and performance. Nor was authorship always attributable. And the Maori sense of time was such that legend did not take the hearer back into the past but rather brought the past forward into the present, making the events described contemporary.

      Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the Maori people, disastrously affected by European “minor” diseases to which they had only weak resistance, appeared to be in decline, and European scholars recorded as much Maori legend as they could, believing that the Maori would die out and that their oral culture, highly figurative and often of rare poetic beauty, deserved preservation. Some of this material was published; a great deal more was stored in libraries and is studied today, not least by Maori students and scholars intent on recovering their own cultural past.

      Although Maori individuals and groups have become notable performers of various kinds of European music, their traditional music also survives. To the 19th-century European ear, the words of Maori poetry were impressive and beautiful, but the music was “tuneless and monotonous” and tended to be ignored. It is, however, inseparable from the words, and the scholars Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell were the first to publish text and music together. McLean and Orbell distinguished three kinds of waiata (songs (song)): waiata tangi (laments—for the dead, but also for other kinds of loss or misfortune), waiata aroha (songs about the nature of love—not only sexual love but also love of place or kin), and waiata whaiaaipo (songs of courtship or praise of the beloved). In addition, there are pao (gossip songs), poi (songs accompanying a dance performed with balls attached to flax strings, swung rhythmically), oriori (songs composed for young children of chiefly or warrior descent, to help them learn their heritage), and karanga (somewhere between song and chant, performed by women welcoming or farewelling visitors on the marae). Some chants are recited rather than sung. These include karakia (forms of incantation invoking a power to protect or to assist the chanter), paatere (chants by women in rebuttal of gossip or slander, asserting the performer's high lineage and threatening her detractors), kaioraora (expressions of hatred and abuse of an enemy, promising terrible revenge), and the haka (a chant accompanied by rhythmic movements, stamping, and fierce gestures, the most famous of these being war dances that incorporate stylized violence). In every aspect of this tradition, the texts, which in pre-European times survived through memorization, were inseparable from gestures and sometimes music. The most widely used modern development of these traditional forms is the waiata-a-ringa (action song), which fits graceful movements to popular European melodies.

Modern Maori literature
 Until the 1970s there was almost no connection between the classical Maori tradition, preserved largely as a historical record, and the development of a postcolonial English-language literature of New Zealand. When Maori writers began to appear after World War II, they wrote in English, and the most notable of them knew little or nothing of the Maori language. In 1966 Jacqueline Sturm, wife of the poet James K. Baxter, became the first Maori writer to appear in a major anthology of New Zealand short stories. By that time, Hone Tuwhare, the first Maori poet to make a strong impression in English, had published his first book, No Ordinary Sun (1964). Witi Ihimaera (Ihimaera, Witi)'s short stories, collected in Pounamu, Pounamu (1972; “Greenstone, Greenstone”), and his novel Tangi (1973) seemed finally to establish Maori writers as part of modern New Zealand writing. The Whale Rider (1987; film 2002) gained Ihimaera an international readership. Patricia Grace's narratives of Maori life—Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), The Dream Sleepers, and Other Stories (1980), Potiki (1986)—were very widely read, especially in schools as part of a broad effort in New Zealand to encourage the study of Maori writing. And Keri Hulme (Hulme, Keri)'s The Bone People (1983), winner of Britain's Booker Prize in 1985, probably outsold, both at home and abroad, any other book written during the postwar period. In the work of these writers, the language is English, the forms (particularly in fiction) are European, and “Maoriness” is partly a matter of subject, partly of sensibility, and partly (as in the case of Hulme, who has only one Maori great-grandparent and who changed her given name from Kerry to Keri) sympathetic identification.

      But, increasingly through the 1980s, there was a tendency to politicize Maori issues in literature, something seen clearly in Ihimaera's The Matriarch (1986) and in some of the later fictions of Grace, where the misfortunes of the Maori are laid, sometimes angrily, at the Pakeha door. A reaction against this came from Maori novelist Alan Duff—author of Once Were Warriors (1990; film 1994)—who argued that the Maori must take responsibility for their own failures and find the means to correct them and who spoke somewhat scornfully of his fellow Maori writers, saying that they sentimentalize Maori life. This polarization within the Maori literary community continued with the publication of Grace's Cousins (1992) and Ihimaera's Bulibasha (1994) on the one hand, both of which present positive images of a people who were damaged by colonialism and racism but who are fighting back, and with Duff's What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (1996) on the other hand, in which salvation for the Maori is again seen as lying within integration, education, and acceptance of individual responsibility. Duff's controversial view was taken further in his autobiographical Out of the Mist and Steam (1999), in which his abusive Maori mother seems intended to be seen as typical while his bookish, intellectual Pakeha father represents a path of escape from the cycle of violence, failure, and despair. In the 1990s, after more than two decades of marriage and as the father of two daughters, Ihimaera publicly acknowledged his homosexuality; this added a further dimension not so much to his work itself but to the way it is read and the kind of interest taken in it.

      A different form of politicization has come from Maori poets, some of whom rediscovered, partly through academic study, the classic forms of Maori poetry and returned to them in the Maori language. Since there are only a few thousand fluent speakers of the language (government statistics from 2001 said something over 10,000 adult Maori claimed to speak the language “well” or “very well”), this has been seen by some as an exercise in self-limitation, while to others it appears to be a brave assertion of identity; anthologies of New Zealand poetry now include examples of these new poets' work in Maori with translations into English. Of the Maori poets writing in English, Robert Sullivan is the one whose work attracted the most attention at the turn of the 21st century.

      Maori character and tradition have also found expression in the theatre, in plays written predominantly in English but with injections of Maori. Among the best of these works are Hone Kouka's Nga tangata toa (published 1994; “The Warrior People”) and Waiora (published 1997; “Health”).

Pakeha (European) literature
      Modern discussions of New Zealand literature have not given much attention to the 19th century. Immigrant writers were Britishers abroad. Only those born in the “new” land could see it as New Zealanders; and even they, for most of the first 100 years of settlement (1820–1920), had to make conscious efforts to relocate the imagination and adapt the literary tradition to its new home. It is not surprising, then, that the most notable 19th-century writing is found not in poetry and fiction but rather in letters, journals, and factual accounts, such as Lady Mary Anne Barker (Barker, Lady Mary Anne)'s Station Life in New Zealand (1870), Samuel Butler (Butler, Samuel)'s A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and, perhaps most notably, Frederick Maning (Maning, Frederick)'s Old New Zealand (1863).

      The best of the 19th-century poets include Alfred Domett (Domett, Alfred), whose Ranolf and Amohia (1872) was a brave if premature attempt to discover epic material in the new land; John Barr, a Scottish dialect poet in the tradition of Robert Burns; David McKee Wright, who echoed the Australian bush ballad tradition; and William Pember Reeves (Reeves, William Pember), born in New Zealand, who rose to be a government minister and then retired to Britain, where he wrote nostalgic poems in the voice of a colonist. They were competent versifiers and rhymers, interesting for what they record. But none of the poets stands out until the 20th century, the first being Blanche Edith Baughan (Reuben, and Other Poems [1903]), followed by R.A.K. Mason (In the Manner of Men [1923] and Collected Poems [1962]) and Mary Ursula Bethell (From a Garden in the Antipodes [1929] and Collected Poems [1950]).

 New Zealand literature, it might be said, was making a slow and seemly appearance, but already the whole historical process had been preempted by one brief life—that of Katherine Mansfield (Mansfield, Katherine) (born Kathleen Beauchamp), who died in 1923 at age 34, having laid the foundations for a reputation that has gone on to grow and influence the development of New Zealand literature ever since. Impatient at the limitations of colonial life, she relocated to London in 1908, published her first book of short stories (In a German Pension [1911]) at age 22, and, for the 12 years remaining to her, lived a life whose complicated threads have, since her death, seen her reappearing in the biographies, letters, and journals of writers as famous as T.S. Eliot (Eliot, T.S.), Virginia Woolf (Woolf, Virginia), Bertrand Russell (Russell, Bertrand), and D.H. Lawrence (Lawrence, D.H.). More important, she “altered for good and all” (in the words of the British writer Elizabeth Bowen (Bowen, Elizabeth)) “our idea of what goes to make a story.” Two additional books published in her lifetime (Bliss and Other Stories [1920] and The Garden Party, and Other Stories [1922]) were followed by posthumously published stories, collections of poems, literary criticism, letters, and journals. She became for a time a major figure, faded for two decades, and was rediscovered in the 1970s by feminists and by scholars examining the Bloomsbury group. It seemed, from any perspective, that Mansfield remained a New Zealand writer whose best work was that in which she had re-created the country and family she had grown up in.

      Mansfield once wrote, “I want to make my own country leap in the eyes of the Old World”—and she did it. She also made the short story respectable, established it as a form sufficient in itself for a writer's reputation to rest on, and made it a staple of New Zealand writing. But she never completed a novel.

      The first important New Zealand novels came from two writers whose scene was northern New Zealand: William Satchell (The Land of the Lost [1902], The Toll of the Bush [1905], and The Greenstone Door [1914]) and Jane Mander (Mander, Jane) (The Story of a New Zealand River [1920]). They were followed by John A. Lee, whose Children of the Poor (1934), mixing fiction and oratory, was drawn from his own experience of childhood poverty in the South Island; Robin Hyde, who in The Godwits Fly (1938) still wrestled with the sense of colonial isolation; and John Mulgan, whose Man Alone (1939) held in balance both the colonial romanticism of the solitary figure in the empty landscape and the leftist romanticism of “men moving together” to change the world. In the 1930s Ngaio Marsh (Marsh, Ngaio) began publishing the detective novels for which she became internationally known.

Post-World War II

Poetry
      A Book of New Zealand Verse (1945; rev. ed. 1951), edited by Allen Curnow (Curnow, Allen), is usually held to mark the advent of New Zealand literature's “postcolonial” phase. It was Modernist, nationalist, and critically sophisticated, and Curnow's long, elegant introduction set a new standard for the discussion of local writing. Curnow's own poetry, though not immediately as well received as that of his contemporaries Denis Glover and A.R.D. Fairburn, had intensity, precision, and formal control that theirs, for all its lyric ease and vividness of local reference, could not match. Curnow eventually became, with James K. Baxter (Baxter, James K.) (a younger poet whose merit Curnow was quick to recognize), one of the country's dominating poetic presences.

      By the end of the 1950s—when his second and more comprehensive anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), was about to appear—Curnow was already a major figure on the literary landscape against whom younger poets felt the need to rebel. The decade of the 1960s, however, was dominated by Baxter's poetry and charismatic presence. Baxter was a very public and prolific writer whose Collected Poems (1979), which appeared after his death (in 1972 at age 46), contained more than 600 pages; it was said that possibly three times as many additional poems remained in unpublished manuscript. He was effortless and natural in verse—a modern Byron—while Curnow was all conscious skill and contrivance. It was in the year of Baxter's death that Curnow began publishing again, extending his reputation at home and, through the 1980s, establishing a reputation abroad. Curnow received many awards, culminating in the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, a rare honour he shared with such poets as W.H. Auden (Auden, W H), Robert Graves (Graves, Robert), and Ted Hughes (Hughes, Ted).

      Other poets whose work came to the fore during the 1950s and '60s include Kendrick Smithyman, a poet almost as prolific as Baxter but whose poems are much more densely textured and oblique; Fleur Adcock (Adcock, Fleur), who emigrated to London and established herself among respected British poets; C.K. Stead (Stead, C.K.), who, in addition to his role as poet, earned an international reputation as a literary critic with his book The New Poetic (1964); and Vincent O'Sullivan, who, like Stead, was an academic as well as a poet and a writer of plays and short stories.

 Among the poets who became known in the 1970s and '80s were several whose work showed, at least as a general tendency, a shift away from British and toward American models of Modernism and postmodernism. Two of the most talented were Ian Wedde, whose energy, formal inventiveness, and stylistic charm in the use of spoken language extended the range of New Zealand poetry, and Bill Manhire, a witty understater and unsettler of reality. Others also appearing then included Murray Edmond, a dour but resourceful pupil of the American school; Elizabeth Smither, whose poetic world was sharpened by her sense of ironies and contradictions; Anne French, who made gossip into high art; and Leigh Davis, a poet and literary theorist who gave up poetry for higher finance. Lauris Edmond, who began publishing in middle age, was an anomaly among these poets, riding high on the feminist tide of those two decades but writing in a more conventional poetic style that set her apart from her publishing contemporaries.

      Gregory O'Brien was among the more notable poets who marked out a space for themselves in the 1990s. O'Brien, who was also a painter, sometimes illustrated his semi-surreal poems with matching iconography. Other poets were Jenny Bornholdt, a warmhearted, clever observer of the everyday; Andrew Johnston, also a witty poet, who gave language a degree of freedom to create its own alternative reality; and Michele Leggott, the most scholarly of this group and the one who took the most, and most directly, from American postmodernists such as Louis Zukofsky.

Fiction
      In postwar fiction the central figure was Frank Sargeson (Sargeson, Frank). He had begun publishing stories in the 1930s, attempting to do for New Zealand what Mark Twain had done for America and Henry Lawson for Australia—find a language in fiction that represented the New Zealand voice and character. That Summer, and Other Stories (1946) gathered together the best of his early stories, and it was followed by the experimental novel I Saw in My Dream (1949). Although both these books were published in London, Sargeson was seen by New Zealand writers as something of an inspiration—a man committed to full-time writing and to the “life of literature” in New Zealand.

 Among his most notable younger protégés were Maurice Duggan, whose stories brought a new level of sophistication into New Zealand fiction, and the novelist Janet Frame (Frame, Janet), whose fame was to outstrip that of her mentor. From her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), Frame's work was internationally respected though never widely popular. However, with the publication of her three-volume autobiography (To the Is-Land [1982], An Angel at My Table [1984], and The Envoy from Mirror City [1985]) and its adaptation (written by Laura Jones; directed by Jane Campion) into the movie An Angel at My Table (1990), Frame's work received much wider attention, attracting interest both because of that part of it that draws upon her younger years, when she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked away in mental hospitals, and because of its technical experimentation and linguistic inventiveness.

 Sargeson himself continued to write throughout the postwar period. While respect for his historical importance, both as a short-story writer and as a mentor to younger writers, continued to grow, interest in his novels (such as Memoirs of a Peon [1965] and Joy of the Worm [1969]) had waned by the turn of the 21st century. His three-volume autobiography—Once Is Enough (1973), More Than Enough (1975), and Never Enough (1977)—is, however, a lively trilogy equal to Frame's in interest and in the quality of the writing.

      The 1960s saw the rise to prominence of two young novelists, Maurice Gee (Gee, Maurice) and Maurice Shadbolt (Shadbolt, Maurice), neither of them much interested in technical innovation, both writing traditional, solid, realistic novels giving New Zealanders a more comprehensive view of themselves and their society than fiction had previously offered. For a long time Gee's best work was considered to be his Plumb trilogy—Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), and Sole Survivor (1983)—which tells the story of the Christian leftist George Plumb (based on Gee's grandfather) and the subsequent fortunes of his children and grandchildren. His later novels, however—including Going West (1992), Crime Story (1994), and Live Bodies (1998)—show a further extension of his range and ease as a novelist, social historian, and moralist. Shadbolt's background and interests were also of the political left. The typical central character in Shadbolt's early work is a product of a working-class background who finds himself among writers and artists, is involved in love affairs and marriages, but is always concerned about politics, especially the politics of what it means to be a New Zealander. Strangers and Journeys (1972) gathers together and restates all the themes of his early work, after which Shadbolt found a new subject in 19th-century Maori-Pakeha relations (also explored by Stead in his novel The Singing Whakapapa [1994]). Shadbolt's attention focused especially on the 1860s, the period of the New Zealand Wars, fought between European colonists and the Maori over control of land. His three novels on that subject—Season of the Jew (1986), Monday's Warriors (1990), and The House of Strife (1993)—are possibly his best.

      Other notable novelists of the postwar period include Bill Pearson, whose one novel, Coal Flat (1963), gives a sober, faithful, strongly written account of life in a small mining town on the West Coast of the South Island; David Ballantyne (Sydney Bridge Upside Down [1968] and The Talkback Man [1978]), the “lost man” of those decades whose work deserves more readers than it has had; and Ronald Hugh Morrieson, whose bizarre, semi-surreal, and rollicking stories of small-town life, The Scarecrow (1963) and Came a Hot Friday (1964), were largely ignored when they were published but have since been hailed as unique and valuable. Sylvia Ashton-Warner (Ashton-Warner, Sylvia), by contrast, wrote an international best seller, Spinster (1958), a success unmatched by her later novels, but her fine autobiography, I Passed This Way (1979), is the personal record of a brilliant “natural” both as a writer and as a teacher.

Drama
      In the 1960s Curnow, Baxter, and Sargeson had all written plays of literary interest but no great public success; the 1970s and '80s, however, saw significant development in the writing and production of New Zealand plays. Bruce Mason, whose one-man show The End of the Golden Weather (published 1962) had been performed hundreds of times all over the country, continued to write and saw the best of his earlier plays with Maori themes—The Pohutukawa Tree (published 1960) and Awatea (published 1969)—given professional productions. Mervyn Thompson wrote expressionist plays mixing elements of autobiography with social and political comment (O! Temperance! and First Return [both published 1974]). Greg McGee probed the surface of New Zealand's “national game,” rugby, in the hugely successful Foreskin's Lament (published 1981). Roger Hall wrote clever comedies and satires of New Zealand middle-class life—Middle Age Spread (published 1978), which was produced in London's West End, and Glide Time (published 1977). O'Sullivan's Shuriken (published 1985) used a riot by Japanese soldiers in a New Zealand prison camp to illustrate how understanding and sympathy fail to cross cultural boundaries. Drama, the last of the major literary genres to get started in New Zealand, developed rapidly in the 1980s, and new playwrights (Stuart Hoar, Michael Lord, Hilary Beaton, Renée [original name Renée Taylor], and Stephen Sinclair, for example) were finding producers, casts, and audiences as never before.

The turn of the 21st century
      The short story continued to be an important form for New Zealand writers through the last decades of the 20th century. One of its best modern exponents was Owen Marshall (The Lynx Hunter, and Other Stories [1987], The Divided World [1989]); O'Sullivan (Survivals and Other Stories [1985]) was another. O'Sullivan published both poetry and fiction (though Hyde and, to some extent, Frame, had done the same before), and this practice of writing across genres became a feature of the 1980s and '90s. Two well-known novelists, Fiona Kidman (A Breed of Women [1979], Paddy's Puzzle [1983], True Stars [1990], Ricochet Baby [1996]) and Marilyn Duckworth (Married Alive [1985], Rest for the Wicked [1986], Pulling Faces [1987], A Message from Harpo [1989], Unlawful Entry [1992], Leather Wings [1995]), also published collections of poems. Smither, best known as a poet, published several novels, including Brother-Love, Sister-Love (1986). Wedde extended his range from poetry to the novel with Symmes Hole (1986). Fiona Farrell, whose novels include The Skinny Louis Book (1992) and Six Clever Girls Who Became Famous Women (1996), moved back and forth between fiction and poetry. And Stead, whose political fantasy Smith's Dream (1971) went through many reprints, continued to write both poetry and fiction in the 1980s and into the next century. Many of his novels were published simultaneously in New Zealand and Britain, including The Death of the Body (1986), The End of the Century at the End of the World (1992), Talking About O'Dwyer (1999), Mansfield (2004), and My Name Was Judas (2006).

      Notable in the final decades of the 20th century was the number of literary biographies and autobiographies published, as if New Zealanders had become eager to record and to read about the creators of their national literature. There were full biographies published of Fairburn, Sargeson, Baxter, Duggan, Glover, and Frame, as well as of the novelist and short-story writer Dan Davin. In addition to the autobiographies of Duff, Frame, Sargeson, and Ashton-Warner, Shadbolt (2 vol.), Duckworth, Lauris Edmond (3 vol.), the poet Charles Brasch, and the poet and novelist Kevin Ireland also published accounts of their lives.

      Also frequently remarked upon was the number of younger women novelists writing in, and largely about, New Zealand while finding a major publisher abroad. These include Elizabeth Knox, whose novel The Vintner's Luck (1998) won international acclaim, as well as Catherine Chidgey, Charlotte Grimshaw, Emily Perkins, and Sarah Quigley.

      A new element entered New Zealand literature in the writing of recent immigrants, particularly those from the Pacific Islands, as in the case of the Samoan novelist Albert Wendt (Wendt, Albert) (Sons for the Return Home [1973], Leaves of the Banyan Tree [1979], Black Rainbow [1992]). But also among these immigrants were some who came, or whose parents came, from places in Europe where the primary language was not English and the culture was not British or British-derived. Writers such as Renato Amato, Riemke Ensing, and Kapka Kassabova, born respectively in Italy, The Netherlands, and Bulgaria, drew inspiration from such places. Amelia Batistich wrote about immigrants from Croatia, and Yvonne du Fresne wrote about those from Denmark; though Batistich and du Fresne were born in New Zealand, both wrote about places where family connections remained strong.

Christian Karlson Stead

Additional Reading
Especially useful overviews of New Zealand literature are Patrick Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (1990); and Terry Sturm (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, 2nd ed. (1998). Other critical studies and histories are E.H. McCormick, New Zealand Literature: A Survey (1959); Joan Stevens, The New Zealand Novel, 1860–1965, 2nd ed. rev. (1966); C.K. Stead, In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (1981), and Answering to the Language: Essays on Modern Writers (1989); Lawrence Jones, Barbed Wire & Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose (1987); Mark Williams, Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists (1990); Alex Calder (ed.), The Writing of New Zealand: Inventions and Identities (1993); and Kai Jensen, Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature (1996).Anthologies of Maori literature include Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell (eds.), Traditional Songs of the Maori (1975, reprinted 1990); and Witi Ihimaera and D.S. Long (eds.), Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing (1982). Wide-ranging anthologies of poetry are Allen Curnow (ed.), A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–50 (1951), and The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960); Fleur Adcock (ed.), The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982); Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen (eds.), The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985); Vincent O'Sullivan (ed.), An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, 3rd ed. (1987); Miriama Evans, Harvey McQueen, and Ian Wedde (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1989); and Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O'Brien, and Mark Williams (eds.), An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (1997). Anthologies of short stories include Marion McLeod and Bill Manhire (eds.), Some Other Country: New Zealand's Best Short Stories (1984); Vincent O'Sullivan (ed.), The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories (1992); and Michael Morrissey (ed.), The Flamingo Anthology of New Zealand Short Stories (2000). Other anthologies are Charles Brasch (ed.), Landfall Country (1962); MacDonald P. Jackson and Vincent O'Sullivan (eds.), The Oxford Book of New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (1983); and Fergus Barrowman (compiler), The Picador Book of Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (1996). Landfall (semiannual) is a New Zealand literary journal.Christian Karlson Stead

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