Lighted Windows: Critical Essays on Robin Hyde

‘Looking through lighted windows’

...four walls and a roof get in the way, are the very point where one is fatally side-tracked from ever having a home in this world. I want a sort of natural order and containment, a centre of equipoise, an idea – not a cell into which one can retreat, but a place from which one can advance...

Robin Hyde, journalist, poet, novelist, war correspondent (from China, in 1938) and committed political figure, was central to the movements and debates of a volatile period in New Zealand’s development. She was not afraid to draw on her own experience of the dangers of new-found freedoms for women.

This first critical study of the diverse writings of Robin Hyde enlarges our understanding of a courageous yet vulnerable figure by means of the following accessible yet authoritative essays:

1 An island over the edge of the world: Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children Michelle Elleray

2 Running ever out of reach: carnival and fantasy on Wednesday’s island Renata Casertano

3 No alternative: Robin Hyde and the politics of loss Nadine Attewell

4 Violence and the Psychology of Recklessness: Robin Hyde’s Passport to Hell Alex Calder

5 Other pastures: death, fantasy and the Gothic in Robin Hyde’s short stories Alison Jeffries

6 China, imagined and actual in Robin Hyde’s The Godwits Fly Diana Bridge

7 Thoroughly Modern Malory Megan Clayton

8 Archival Poetics: Michele Leggott reads Robin Hyde Susan Ash & Edith Cowan

9 When Iris met Eve: An Australasian friendship Brigid Magner

10 Angel-guarded liar in a pleasant, quiet room Alison Hunt

11 Hyde’s parliamentary reports: journalism and initiation Nikki Hessell

12 Interviews with a ghost Jolisa Gracewood

Editor

Mary Edmond-Paul has previously edited two anthologies (one of poetry and one of prose) and published Her Side of the Story (1999), which explored the importance of reading three women writers in terms of the material culture of which their work was part.

Publication details
Title: Lighted Windows
Subtitle: Critical Essays on Robin Hyde ISBN 978 1 877372 58 2 In store from: October 2008 Price: NZ$40.00

www.otago.ac.nz/press

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