The coastal Gothic in Aotearoa New Zealand: Reclaimed land and unsettling seas in Janet Frame’s 1960s fiction

This article argues that Janet Frame’s 1960s fiction is characterized by close attention to coastal regions and that her novels from this period depict Aotearoa New Zealand’s coastlines as haunted by the violent histories of imperialism. It reads both A State of Siege (1966) and The Rainbirds (1968) as belonging to a wider, largely unacknowledged female Pakeha tradition of the coastal Gothic, first developed by an earlier generation of writers including Katherine Mansfield and Robin Hyde. These women imagined their country’s beaches as littoral borderlands, places which could allow them to question calcified modes of national belonging. Situating Frame’s writing within this literary context underscores how her novels anticipate and interrogate contemporary debates surrounding marine jurisdiction, coastal housing developments, and the legacies of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand.