Janet Frame in Focus

New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924-2004) during her lifetime published 11 novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and a children’s book. The details of her life–her tragic early years, her confinement in a psychiatric hospital and her miraculous reprieve–overshadow her work and she remains largely neglected by scholars. These essays focus on Frame’s autobiography, short stories and novels. Contributors from around the world explore a range of topics, including her mother’s Christadelphian faith, her relationships with two 20th century icons (William Theophilus Brown and John Money), and a view of Frame in the context of trauma studies. Two of the essays were presented at the 2014 Northeast Modern Language Association convention.

Josephine A. McQuail, a professor of English at Tennessee Technological University, is active in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Tennessee Education Association (TEA). She lives in Cookeville, Tennessee.

Edited by Josephine A. McQuail

Foreword by Patricia Moran

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 207
Bibliographic Info: 11 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2018
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6973-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2854-7
Imprint: McFarland

Foreword (Patricia Moran) 1
Introduction (Josephine A. McQuail) 7

Part One. Autobiography
Janet Frame’s New Zealand Autobiography: A Postcolonial Odyssey (Suzette A. Henke) 14
A Soldier’s Daughter: The Autobiographies and Autobiographical Fiction of Janet Frame and Doris Lessing (Cyrena Mazlin) 39
Deriding the I: Tales of Darkness and Laughter in An Angel at My Table (Aurelia Mouzet) 62

Part Two. Short Stories
Strategies of Avoidance in The Lagoon and Other Stories (Claire Bazin) 84
Lagoonization: The Aesthetics of Insularity and Porosity in The Lagoon and Other Stories (Jennifer Boum Make) 95

Part Three. Novels
Faces in the Water: “The Feast of Fools” or the Rewriting of the Carnivalesque as Serving Thanatos (Marion Clavier) 110
Men Without Women: Daughter Buffalo and Female Victimization (Josephine A. McQuail) 127
Distanciation or the Poetry of Loneliness in Towards Another Summer (Manon-Lili Morand) 144
Illumination and the Silver Palm: The Pattern of Three and the Quest for Identity in The Edge of the Alphabet (Jennifer Rideout) 158
Janet Frame’s New Gothic: Language in A State of Siege (Josephine A. McQuail) 171

About the Contributors 187
Janet Frame: A Bibliography 189
Index 197