Book review

Abstract

This is a substantial (400 pages) and, in many ways, comprehensive discussion of a range of interconnected themes, texts, and topoi in the literature of New Zealand. There is a shortish introduction and then chapters of sixty or so pages each on isolation in the back-country; outsiders and misfits; the lonely and the alone in the fiction of Janet Frame; Maurice Gee and postmodern isolation; women, isolation, and history; and cultural deracination and isolation.