News

"Maoriland" online

28 November 2007

Byline:	Alison Stevenson (Electronic Text Centre)
Source:	Humanities Research Network

The novels of nineteenth century New Zealand are part of the under-read and undervalued period in our cultural history.

Although the term "Maoriland" may evoke a world of saccharine fantasy in which Maori warriors in heroic attitudes and Maori maidens in seductive ones inhabited outmoded Victorian literary forms, recent critics have argued that there was a lively and significant colonial literature, full of complexities, contradictions, evasions and the beginnings of a self-consciously New Zealand literature.

One of barriers to further research has been that virtually everything is out of print and in some cases only survives in one or two copies, kept carefully in rare book collections. Over the last twelve months the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) has been working with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the J C Beaglehole Room Special Collections at Victoria University to create a freely available digital collection of the novels of Maoriland published prior to 1900. Our hope is that by increasing access to these texts, however bizarre and at times unpalatable some of the writers opinions might be, this project will stimulate further scholarly examination and a wider appreciation for the importance of this period of New Zealand literary history.

The first thirty-four titles from the digital collections are now online along with an introduction by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams.