Marxist Essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature
Dougal McNeill
In Forms of Freedom, Dougal McNeill explores how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world. In engaging prose and with impressive intellectual range, McNeill applies insights from Marxist critical theory to the works of selected Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian writers.
From Harry Holland, Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore responding to the legacy of Robert Burns in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first-century novelists applying their literary imaginations to intersectional spaces and Indigenous, settler, gendered and international freedom traditions, McNeill reveals literature’s capacity to find potent forms with which to articulate concepts of, and beliefs about, freedom.
McNeill’s argument for literature as an essential ‘form of freedom’ is a resonant call for our times. Incorporating discussion of work by 13 authors from both sides of the Tasman, Forms of Freedom is an essential book for students and researchers of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian literature.
Authors whose work is discussed in Forms of Freedom include:
Pip Adam; Mary Gilmore; Patricia Grace; Dorothy Hewett; Harry Holland; Eve Langley; Henry Lawson; Amanda Lohrey; Elsie Locke; Emily Perkins; Alice Tawhai; Hone Tuwhare; Ellen van Neerven; Albert Wendt.
Author
Dougal McNeill teaches in the English Literatures & Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Wellington. He is active in the Tertiary Education Union. His other books include Writing the 1926 General Strike, co-authored with Charles Ferrall, and an edition of Harry Holland’s Robert Burns: Poet and Revolutionist.
Publication details
Paperback, 230x150mm, 248pp
ISBN 9781990048760
RRP $45
Release date: 15 August 2024
Reviews and Interviews
Unity Books Wellington Bestseller Chart for the week ending 23 August Read
Extract: 'Ambitious, entertaining, and hard-thought' says Steve Braunias about Forms of Freedom. Read an extract from the book on Newsroom.
Review: Anna Rankin reviews Forms of Freedom on Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan, RNZ Listen
Review: 'Forms of Freedom, while being a very serious exploration of “how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world”, is also an argument for pleasure and connection and relationships. I am grateful for this book as a Māori writer and reader who has been thinking a lot about freedom and how literature can allow for it. I don’t know if I have experienced true freedom in writing for a long time. I feel the demands of this moment in history too perplexing and demanding and draining to allow much freedom, and yet I know that the next place to go, the only place that really matters, is the place where the imagination, and the pen, are free. How do we make space for that? How do we even conceive of it? Forms of Freedom gives us some ancestors, some visionaries, some clues ...' – Tina Makereti writes about Forms of Freedom for The Spinoff Read