Greville Texidor, Frank Sargeson and New Zealand Literary Culture in the 1940S
All the juicy pastures: Greville Texidor, Frank Sargeson and New Zealand literary culture in the 1940s by Margot Schwass A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Victoria University of Wellington 2017 ABSTRACT The cultural nationalist narrative, and the myths of origin and invention associated with it, cast a long shadow over the mid-twentieth century literary landscape. But since at least the 1980s, scholars have turned their attention to what was happening at the margins of that dominant narrative, revealing untold stories and evidence of unexpected literary meeting points, disruptions and contradictions. The nationalist frame has thus lost purchase as the only way to understand the era’s literature. The 1940s in particular have emerged as a time of cultural recalibration in which subtle shifts were being nourished by various sources, not least the émigré and exilic artists who came to New Zealand from war-torn Europe. They included not only refugees but also a group of less classifiable wanderers and nomads. Among them was Greville Texidor, the peripatetic Englishwoman who transformed herself into a writer and produced a small body of fiction here, including what Frank Sargeson would call “one of the most beautiful prose works ever achieved in this country” (“Greville Texidor” 135). The Sargeson-Texidor encounter, and the larger exilic-nationalist meeting it signifies, is the focus of this thesis. By the early 1940s, Sargeson was the acknowledged master of the New Zealand short story, feted for his ‘authentic’ vision of local reality and for the vernacular idiom and economical form he had developed to render it.
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