Into the Fog: Literature and Censorship in New Zealand

Abstract

Despite the fact that New Zealand has an active censorship regime that has, in its time, banned or restricted some significant literary works, literary academics do not seem particularly engaged in censorship debates here. The 2015 case in which the Young Adult novel Into the River was reclassified four times during which process it was placed under an Interim Restriction Order suggests that perhaps greater attention is warranted. In this essay I argue that the current censorship legislation, the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act, 1993, does not represent literature in a way that most academics would recognise and support, and nor is it consistent in its own terms.