Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature

Nicholas Birns · Nicole Moore · Sarah Shieff

may 2017 · Options for Teaching Libro 40 · Modern Language Association

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Australia and New Zealand, united geographically by their location in the South Pacific and linguistically by their English-speaking inhabitants, share the strong bond of hope for cultural diversity and social equality--one often challenged by history, starting with the appropriation of land from their Indigenous peoples. This volume explores significant themes and topics in Australian and New Zealand literature. In their introduction, the editors address both the commonalities and differences between the two nations' literatures by considering literary and historical contexts and by making nuanced connections between the global and the local. Contributors share their experiences teaching literature on the iconic landscape and ecological fragility; stories and perspectives of convicts, migrants, and refugees; and Maori and Aboriginal texts, which add much to the transnational turn.

This volume presents a wide array of writers--such as Patrick White, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Witi Ihimaera, Christina Stead, Allen Curnow, David Malouf, Les Murray, Nam Le, Miles Franklin, Kim Scott, and Sally Morgan--and offers pedagogical tools for teachers to consider issues that include colonial and racial violence, performance traditions, and the role of language and translation. Concluding with a list of resources, this volume serves to support new and experienced instructors alike.

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Nicholas Birns is the author of Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (2015), Theory after Theory (2010), and Barbarian Memory (2013); the editor of Willa Cather: Critical Insights (2011); and the coeditor of A Companion to Australian Literature since 1990 (2007). He edits Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian / NZ Literature.

Nicole Moore is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and professor in English at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. She is the author of The Censor's Library (2012), a coeditor of the Norton anthology The Literature of Australia (2009), and editor of the collection Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View (2015).

Sarah Shieff is associate professor of English at the University of Waikato. Her main teaching and research interests are New Zealand literature and cultural history, gothic fiction, the literature of trauma, and food writing. She edited Letters of Frank Sargeson (2012) and the Journal of New Zealand Literature, 2005-15. She is currently preparing an edition of the letters of Denis Glover.