New Zealand English language periodicals of literary interest active 1920s-1960s

Abstract

The primary objective of this thesis is to provide an account of New Zealand literary magazine activity from the 1920s to the 1960s. While a focus is maintained on the fifteen year period between the appearance of the first issue of Phoenix in March 1932 and the advent of Landfall, the thesis examines several magazines whose issue runs extend well outside that period. The thesis is divided into two volumes, the first of which, in Chapters Two through Five, provides a detailed survey of the four most important periodicals published entirely within the period selected for this study: Phoenix (1932-1933), Tomorrow (1934-1940), Book (1941-1947), and New Zealand New Writing (1942-1945). Chapter Six concludes Volume One with a survey of the numerous university based periodicals, including several published entirely outside the focal period of the study. In Volume Two, Chapters Seven to Nine discuss, in order, the Auckland family magazine the Mirror (1922-1963), the national magazine of the arts Art in New Zealand (1928-1946), and the travel journal the Near Zealand Railways Magazine (1926-1940). All three of these publications are of significance as early sites for the development in New Zealand of the popular fiction genres of romance, adventure and mystery. Chapter Ten deals with a range of minor little magazines, including the New Zealand Mercury (1933-1936), Quill (1934-1948), Anvil (1945-1946), Chapbook (1945-1950), Oriflamme: A Literary Journal (1939-1942), and those edited, printed and published by Noel Farr Hoggard: Spilt Ink (1932-1937), New Triad (1937-1942), Letters (1943-1946), and Arena'(1946-1972). Appendix I supplies an annotated bibliography of the fifty-two periodicals discussed in the body of the thesis. These annotations are supplemented with author indexes for those periodicals not already indexed by earlier researchers. Appendix II compares the text of Allen Curnow's 1939 prose and poetry sequence Not in Narrow Seas with an early version of the sequence published in Tomorrow between June 1937 and August 1938.