The allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities'. Fredric Jameson (1) A large slice of the critical reception of Janet Frame is occupied by post-colonial readings, (2) while a smaller but still significant constituency has deployed certain psychoanalytic concepts of Julia Kristeva's to interpret Frame's texts. (3) An even smaller number of scholars have combined these approaches. (4) Albeit numerically limited, this particular intersection of Frame criticism--what might be called the Kristevan psychoanalytic post-colonialist nexus--raises a number of issues, related to theory and allegory (a mode currently witnessing a renaissance of interest amongst various groups), (5) that have implications for Frame literary studies far more generally.
