ABSTRACT
In 2003, New Zealand literary critic Patrick Evans published a controversial and by now much-quoted essay entitled “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction”. This was a time that Evans saw as “epochal” for New Zealand literature in its transition from the postcolonial to the global. Historically, of course, New Zealand’s most vigorous literary debates have collectively focused on the need to articulate a distinctive national identity as rooted in place. This task, conventionally associated with the cultural nationalist writers of the 1930s, was at first an exclusively Pakeha and male reserve. From the second half of the 20th century, these restrictive literary gates finally opened to incorporate female and then indigenous Maori voices. Apart from considerations of how “made in New Zealand” stories fare in the “blue skies of globalism”, it is essential to turn people's attention to how global economic forces have impacted on New Zealand soil.
