The Expatriate Myth: New Zealand Writers and the Colonial World.

Abstract

Scholarly books about New Zealand literature generally attract only New Zealand readers, but this book is arguably relevant to scholars of all New World countries. As the title suggests, Bones’ argument is a bold one, but it is also meticulously argued using an impressive array of statistics. Pithily summed up, Bones contends that expatriation was not as essential to the New Zealand literary imagination in the early years of the twentieth century as has commonly been portrayed, and it follows from this that the category of ‘expatriate’ may not be particularly useful for explaining or evaluating New Zealand writers’ experiences (10).