Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Colophon
- Introduction
- Criticism
- Creative Writing
- Reports
- Reviews
- Vincent O'Sullivan: Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice
- Marco Sonzogni: Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 (Volume 1) and The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1916-1922 (Volume 2)
- Isobel Maddison: Martin Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925
- Brigid Magner: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand, and Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross, The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction
- Alexandra Smith: Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
- Notes on Contributors
- Katherine Mansfield Society
Brigid Magner: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand, and Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross, The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction
from Reviews
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Colophon
- Introduction
- Criticism
- Creative Writing
- Reports
- Reviews
- Vincent O'Sullivan: Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice
- Marco Sonzogni: Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 (Volume 1) and The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1916-1922 (Volume 2)
- Isobel Maddison: Martin Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925
- Brigid Magner: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand, and Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross, The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction
- Alexandra Smith: Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
- Notes on Contributors
- Katherine Mansfield Society
Summary
It’s fair to say that the fi gure of the ‘man alone’ is a central trope in New Zealand literary studies. These two books consider the man alone theme, albeit in radically different ways. Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross propose that John Mulgan’s seminal novel Man Alone (1939) belongs to a subcategory of the ‘man alone’ topos, one based on the isolation of fugitives and escapees who cannot be assimilated into social networks (50). This is a fairly standard view compared with Alex Calder’s playful re-reading of the novel within the frame of the Western genre. Although Man Alone lacks the trappings of the Western genre, Calder argues, it is plotted along an identical trail, with multiple escapes from the city and from women who threaten the hero’s freedom (232). Within New Zealand studies, Calder observes, the cultural history of the 1930s is often viewed in terms of a narrowly-focused nationalism instead of considering the possibilities of American cultural productions, such as the Western and the music associated with it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial , pp. 201 - 203Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013