"One hundred years after "The country diary of an Edwardian lady" was penned by Edith Holden comes a modern response as charming. New Zealander Christina Ferens shares her insights into the meshed lives of New Zealand fauna as uniquely observed on a daily basis in a still-remote part of the country."--Back cover.
Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies. Viewed through Māori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the Māori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the “innocent eye.” Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence. In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai’s timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial “others”—outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities.
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the campaign for women's suffrage to appear for over thirty years. It challenges the conventional chronology of the subject by arguing that the Victorian suffragists did not undergo a decline during the 1890s but, on the contrary, had effectively won the argument about votes for women by 1900. This view is supported by evidence of the ineffectiveness of Anti-Suffragism, and especially the difficulties it encountered in trying to reconcile female Antis, who were often feminists, with male Antis, who opposed all forms of emancipation. The author adds a new dimension to the argument by discussing the beneficial impact on the British campaign of women's enfranchisement in New Zealand in 1893, and in Australia in 1902; and he shows how crucial to the shift towards suffragist support in parliament were Conservative moves in favour of suffragism in the 1890s. The March of the Women also offers a fresh evaluation of the Edwardian militant campaign. At grass roots level divisions over tactics mattered less than among the London leadership, and suffragette groups were less rigidly divided. It places the Pankhursts and the WSPU in a fresh light by examining their success in raising funds and in tapping the support of the British Establishment, at the same time attacking it and its values; while at the other end of the spectrum non-militants were making an important contribution to the cause by capitalising on working-class and Labour support for women's suffrage.
Positioned at a crossroads between feminist geographies and modernist studies, Excursions into Modernism considers transnational modernist fiction in tandem with more rarely explored travel narratives by women of the period who felt increasingly free to journey abroad and redefine themselves through travel. In an era when Western artists, writers, and musicians sought 'primitive' ideas for artistic renewal, Joyce E. Kelley locates a key similarity between fiction and travel writing in the way women authors use foreign experiences to inspire innovations with written expression and self-articulation. She focuses on the pairing of outward journeys with more inward, introspective ones made possible through reconceptualizing and mobilizing elements of women’s traditional corporeal and domestic geographies: the skin, the ill body, the womb, and the piano. In texts ranging from Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and from Evelyn Scott’s Escapade to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Kelley explores how interactions between geographic movement, identity formation, and imaginative excursions produce modernist experimentation. Drawing on fascinating supplementary and archival materials such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, photographs, and unpublished drafts, Kelley’s book cuts across national and geographic borders to offer rich and often revisionary interpretations of both canonical and lesser-known works.