Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/26631
Title: Imaginative Displacement: Classical Reception in the Young Adult Fiction of Margaret Mahy
Contributor(s): Hale, Elizabeth  (author)orcid 
Publication Date: 2019-03-21
DOI: 10.5040/9781350021266
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/26631
Abstract: Margaret Mahy (1938-2012) wrote many works for young readers: young adult novels, children’s stories, chapter books, educational readers and lectures and essays on aspects of writing. She was New Zealand’s most successful children’s writer, at home and abroad, receiving many national and international honours. Mahy was conscious that her inclinations towards fantasy and fairy tales had been strongly influenced by the stories from overseas that made up her youthful reading. In her essay ‘A Dissolving Ghost,’ she referred to the disjunction between the place she lived, and the mainly British stories she read as a child, as an ‘imaginative displacement’ (Mahy 2000: 32), recognizing a tension commonly felt by New Zealand writers, and acknowledging the pressure she felt to write her New Zealandness more strongly. Her fantasy novels fill what Anna Jackson terms the ‘gap between her colonized imagination and everyday life’ (2011: 48) with a distinctive blend of realism and fantasy that is local and international, even universal, as she entwines ordinary New Zealand life with myth, fantasy and fairytale. Mahy accounted for the scope of her frame of reference, saying that the ‘dislocations’ of that imaginative displacement ‘made me a world rather than categorical’ (2000: 33). As Clare Bradford comments, Mahy’s work is embedded in place, but ‘transnational’ in its imaginative reach (2014: 113).
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: Antipodean Antiquities: Classical Reception Down Under, p. 143-154
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Place of Publication: London, United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781350021235
9781350021242
1350021237
9781350021259
1350021253
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 200505 New Zealand Literature (excl. Maori Literature)
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 470522 New Zealand literature (excl. Māori literature)
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 970120 Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 280116 Expanding knowledge in language, communication and culture
280114 Expanding knowledge in Indigenous studies
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
WorldCat record: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1080881975
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1083096548
Series Name: Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
Editor: Editor(s): Marguerite Johnson
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Files in This Item:
2 files
File Description SizeFormat 
Show full item record

Page view(s)

2,560
checked on May 19, 2024

Download(s)

18
checked on May 19, 2024
Google Media

Google ScholarTM

Check

Altmetric


Items in Research UNE are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.