Martin George Holmes

University of Otago

jmgholmes7@gmail.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2729-7636

Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 3 (September 2023): 7-36, https://doi.org/10.52230/YPDC4098

Abstract:

This article reassesses conservative literary understandings of national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the hope of contributing to a wider analysis of settler nationalism. Scholars have until recently tended to focus on firebrand modernist nationalists who became the literary establishment after the 1930s, and who regarded previous generations as too culturally British and aesthetically conservative. In consequence, the fact that conservatives often espoused their own version of nationalism has been little discussed, and then not always charitably. This is especially the case with respect to conservatives who lived and wrote while the firebrands were in the ascendant. This article redresses this neglect by exploring the work of C. R. Allen (1885–1962), a once-popular author whose works embody a conservative understanding of literary nationalism.

Keywords:

C. R. Allen, settler nationalism, New Zealand literature, New Zealand nationalism, modernism and literature

Article