"The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature offers a comprehensive record of New Zealand writing in easily accessible form. It contains more than 1500 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, novels, plays, poetry, journals, periodicals, anthologies, literary movements, and professional organisations. Its broad scope extends from pre-European Maori oral forms to work across all forms of writing in the late 1990s. Detailed biographies examine the careers and contributions of notable New Zealand writers, while longer entries on such themes as art in New Zealand literature, the Depression, gold-mining, landscape, science fiction, and war and literature provide a strong structural underpinning to the work. The generous range of plot summaries and author entries will prove invaluable to students and all readers with an interest in New Zealand and its literature."--BOOK JACKET.