1‘Maoriland’ is the name that was used to refer to literary New Zealand during the period under scrutiny in this book. Since the 1930s and the advent of Modernism, that period has consistently been considered with embarrassment and contempt by many critics and writers alike for its Romantic sentimentalism. A time of transition, it is a hinge between the Victorian and the Modern periods: 1872 marks the end of the New Zealand Wars, and 1914 the beginning of the First World War.

2Stafford’s and Williams’s standpoint is that it is time to re-examine the literature from that period to understand its impact on the formation of contemporary New Zealand culture. Working at the conjunction between cultural history and literary criticism, they bring a whole body of work out of scholarly isolation by underlining its intellectual richness and cultural complexity. They stress the continuities, rather than the ruptures, between Victorianism and Modernism. They show the varied viewpoints that literature conveyed, challenging the notion of a homogeneous colonial culture. They tackle that period as one of intense cultural and intellectual traffic between New Zealand and various parts of the British Empire, in particular Australia and India, as well as the United States. They analyze expressions of racism, a major but unspoken source of the afore-mentioned ‘embarrassment,’ and locate them in their ideological context. And all these threads lead the reader through the nine chapters of the book, which study significant works by individual writers from that period.

3The first chapter broaches a recurring theme of the period by explaining how Alfred Domett’s poetry and view of Maori people were influenced by European Romanticism, in particular the Celtic Revival and the Ossian poems, all in sharp contrast with Domett’s attitude towards Maori as a Victorian colonizer. Although Jessie Mackay’s poetry (chapter 2) was influenced in similar ways, her perspective is marked by her sympathy, as a woman of Scottish descent, with the Maori who were dispossessed of their lands. The Australian Henry Lawson’s stories (chapter 3), which avoid the Romantic sublime, reflect his shift from a favourable attitude to one of disillusionment with extending sympathy to the Maori. The stories of Alfred A. Grace (chapter 4) rely on the theme of Maori extinction. The authors point at the ‘instability of the concept of the dying race in late-colonial New Zealand’: did it mean ‘extinction, absorption or adaptation’? Looking at Katherine Mansfield’s vignettes and early stories (chapter 5), the authors argue that the sense of Modernist unsettlement in Mansfield’s later work is traceable in these early stories that rely on Maoriland legends. Edith Searle Grossman’s romances (chapter 6) reflect a feminist and progressive agenda; in her sentimentalized version of Maoriland, where men tend to go native, the bush is feminized by women. Chapter 7 proposes an interpretation of Blanche Baughan’s poetry and fiction through her mystical experience. Like many other doubting Victorians, she turned to an alternative form of belief, giving way to a form of mystic internationalism. The Englishman William Satchell’s novels (chapter 8) are Victorian: his colonial characters are gentlemen who experience religious doubt and moral dilemmas, while the Maori are seen as caught between conflicting worlds. Yet, the very sense of displacement, which his novels convey, points at the continuities between Victorianism and Modernism. The final chapter of the book focuses on a poem by Apirana Ngata which shows his position between two cultures, Maori and English, between the colonial past and the modern future, caught in a process of self-invention based on hybridity.

4Maoriland is a brilliant reconsideration of a neglected period in New Zealand literature, and the authors’ argument that it is indeed a rich era is entirely convincing. The strength of the book lies in the fact that it deals with a range of writers, some of whom may seem stereotypical of settler culture when considered individually. But taken together, they reflect the many facets of a complex situation. The authors thus approach settler culture as a heterogeneous construct, both within New Zealand and outside of it. Further, by establishing comparisons between New Zealand literature and literatures of other parts of the Empire, through the writings of Kipling, Stevenson, Eliot, Yeats and Joyce, they locate the book within a larger framework than that of a national literature, shedding light on a cultural past that accounts for various aspects of contemporary culture.

5Because of its openness, this careful re-examination of the colonial-to-modernist period in Maoriland will be of interest not only to scholars of New Zealand literature, but, more broadly, to those dealing with postcolonial literature and culture. The need to re-examine the period that heralded Modernism is found in other countries than New Zealand—in Canada, Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (2006, reviewed by Claire Omhovère, Commonwealth 29.2 [2007]: 123-125) is one such example. It shows the importance of the issues raised in Maoriland, through which Stafford and Williams indirectly question the very notion of postcolonialism.