On Literature
Roger Robinson On Literature
Roger comments:
"After a few years as an academic in the field of English, I decided that literature too important to spend your life on abstruse articles that will be read by a few specialists. "Academic" should mean "well-researched," not "trivial and inaccessible." So I committed myself to making good literary scholarship available to a wide audience. That has been the philosophy of my literary and academic work ever since."
For his most recent book reviews.
Much of Roger's best work is therefore in introductions to editions, opening up to a wide readership literary texts like Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Vogel's Anno Domini 2000, or H.G. Wells's The Food of the Gods; or in literary guides like the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature.
His ability to combine scholarly expertise with high-quality and accessible writing led, for instance, to the recent invitation from the American journal World Literature in English to write on running as a literary subject.
Roger also wrote influential essays, mostly on English novelists - Fielding, Dickens, Eliot, Butler, Hardy, Wells, Burgess, and others. His "Hardy and Darwin" became a widely-used university text, and was cited as seminal when the USA established an association for the study of literature and science. He also became a leading authority on New Zealand literature, editing the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, and a pioneering commentator on the emerging literature of the Pacific island nations.
"Robinson's studies of Pacific writing over a quarter of a century are probably the most rigorous body of work we have in that field." (K. O. Arvidson in the Journal of New Zealand Literature.)
Range of interests
Never narrowly specialized, Robinson's literary work is notable for originality in many different areas.
He linked the 18th century novel with the visual arts and landscaping (Fielding and the English Rococo)
He illuminated Thomas Hardy's work as a tragic poet's response to the impact of Darwin (Oxford Reader's Companion to Thomas Hardy).
He identified the regionalism within New Zealand literature (Writing Wellington)
He showed how Samuel Butler's New Zealand years were formative on his whole writing career, and repositioned Erewhon as an essentially New Zealand work.
He brought Katherine Mansfield "in from the margin."
He repositioned the neglected The Food of the Gods as a pivotal work in the career of H.G. Wells.
He revealed the literary importance of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writings, including political attitudes so radical that they can be read now as "post-colonial."
He wrote the pioneering study of running as a literary subject across the whole of literature in English.
He wrote seminal introductions to Pacific and New Zealand writers like Albert Wendt, Michael Joseph, Alistair te Ariki Campbell, Patricia Grace, and Ian Cross. He initiated the Journal of New Zealand Literature, Victoria University's Creative Writing Fellowship, and several major conferences, as well as keeping a high reputation among students as an outstanding lecturer through a 40-year teaching career.
Roger continues to work as a book reviewer, mostly in the journal New Zealand Books (www.nzbooks.org.nz), specializing in reviews that provide a summative assessment of the writer's work - recently Maurice Gee, Katherine Mansfield, and Fiona Kidman. (See "Literary Reviews"). He is also bringing to fruition his lifetime's study of Samuel Butler, with recent essays in the on-line Dictionary of Literary Biography, the collection Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain, and the book of "counter-factualities," New Zealand As It Might Have Been 2.
