Janet Frame, far south modernist

The essay offers a southern reading of “book-end” works by Janet Frame, her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), and her posthumous Towards Another Summer (2008), while also taking in her autobiographical account of her childhood in To the Is-Land (1982). The discussion will consider how she developed and honed techniques through which at once explicitly to locate herself in the antipodean space of the South Island, and to explore her identity as an Aotearoa New Zealand writer. These disruptive, exploratory techniques might be considered modernist, and hence as copied from metropolitan sources, but I further suggest that she intensively repurposed what she had borrowed, so launching innovative ways of seeing the far south that were explicitly grounded within the spatial and climactic coordinates of her home Island.