The Journal of The Japan Society for New Zealand Studies
Online ISSN : 2432-2733
Print ISSN : 1883-9304
A Feature of Maori Literature : Witi Ihimaera's Novel (1)
Hitoshi Kaneyama
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2003 Volume 10 Pages 36-44

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Abstract
This paper aims to investigate Witi Ihimaera's novel, The Matriarch, which was published in 1986, twelve years after his second, Whanau, with a great change in his political attitude. In his earlier works including short stories, Ihimaera tends to focus nostalgically on traditional Maori community and culture, making Maori issues less explicit. However, The Matriarch is the novel in which Ihimaera deals directly with the politics of Maori alienation and gropes his way towards the recovery of Maoridom. Firstly, Ihimaera's career and change in writing are surveyed through his works, with the description of political, economical and social circumstances. In the next chapter, the epic form, which Ihimaera seems to deploy in The Matriarch, is discussed, referred to some critical points. The Matriarch is a very complex novel. One of the main reason lies in the fact that the novel has a wide range of reference such as Maori myths, cosmology, Italian opera and the Bible, etc. It is regrettable that much of these was left unexamined in this article. It will be dealt with in a sequel of this paper.
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© 2003 The Japan Society for New Zealand Studies
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