The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature appeared in 1989 and The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English a bit over a year later, the first a solo venture by me, the second an eleven-person venture edited by Terry Sturm. It is natural for me to want to associate these two and to think of them as complementary works that will be authoritative for many years; but at the same time it is already possible to begin to see them as historical objects, as things that come from a particular cultural moment in the past--in other words, to guess a little at what our successors as literary historians will make of them when the time comes again to look back as the twelve of us have been doing in our separate ventures. I conceived the idea of writing a literary history in 1976, when researching a book on Janet Frame and confronting as I did so what seemed to me the shocking paucity of literary-critical material in our culture. Coming from a doctorate on postwar American fiction, and having had some awareness of the cultural renaissances that were occurring in Canada and Australia in that decade, I was taken aback by the miniaturist and belletrist trickle that seemed to be the local equivalent. There were good individual works, certainly, here and there; but these seemed confined to reviews or editorials or, less often, to articles. I became aware of more extended works like Holcroft's and McCormick's, but found in the former a vapidity, and in the latter a passivity, that made it difficult for them to grasp the processes that were shaping the literature they were describing. Everyone who wrote had an opinion on something, and often an opinion that was consistent from review to article to review; but no one seemed to know that it was just an opinion, that it came from somewhere, that it was constructed, and that it was possible to believe in something else.
