New work of Frame scholarship

Frameworks

Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame

Edited by Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel

Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2009.

227 pp. (Cross/Cultures 110)

ISBN: 978-90-420-2676-6 Bound €50,-/US$70,

ISBN: 978-90-420-2677-3 E-Book €50,-/US$70,-

Janet Frame’s work is notorious for the demands it makes on reader and critic. This collection of nine new essays by international Frame specialists draws on a range of critical frameworks to explore fresh ways of looking at Frame’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography. At the same time, the essays plug into the energy of Frame’s work to challenge our thinking within and beyond these frameworks.

Frameworks offers a unique per­spective on Frame studies today, show­casing its major concerns as well as heralding new Frame narratives for the decade ahead. Mindful of preceding Frame criticism, these essays use their contemporary vantage-point to recast seminal questions about the relationship between Janet Frame’s work and its critical contexts.

Each of the essays makes a case for framing her work in a particular way, but all are characterized by self-reflexivity regarding their own critical practice and the relationship they assume between exegetical framework and Frame’s work. Underlying this practice, and contained within the pun of the title, are the elementary-sounding yet fundamental questions of Frame studies: How does Frame’s work work? And how do we work with her work?

Contributors:

Valerie Baisnée,

Jan Cronin,

Marc Delrez,

Simone Drichel,

Jennifer Lawn,

Isabel Michell,

Chris Prentice,

Anna Smaill,

Lydia Wevers.

Editors: Jan Cronin lectures in contemporary literature in the Department of English at the University of Auckland. Simone Drichel lectures in postcolonial literature in the Department of English at the University of Otago.