All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand

If you type the name Greville Texidor into a Wikipedia search bar, you may be asked if you mean instead ‘grevillea teodor’. Alternatively, you’ll be redirected to biographical websites for Maurice Duggan, one of postwar New Zealand’s most famous short story writers, or Kendrick Smithyman, editor of Greville Texidor’s volume of selected fiction, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. To learn anything about Greville Texidor herself, you need to read All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand, by Wellington-based writer Margot Schwass. Beautifully written, deeply researched, richly illustrated, this critical biography addresses the question of why we should care about the career of a woman writer born in England in 1902, who died by her own hand in Australia in 1964, and who in her lifetime published only seven short stories, a post- Spanish Civil War novella called These Dark Glasses, a few translations of Lorca poems, and a smattering of other non-fiction pieces. Schwass also tackles the question of why we should care about Greville Texidor as a New Zealand writer

All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand

If you type the name Greville Texidor into a Wikipedia search bar, you may be asked if you mean instead ‘grevillea teodor’. Alternatively, you’ll be redirected to biographical websites for Maurice Duggan, one of postwar New Zealand’s most famous short story writers, or Kendrick Smithyman, editor of Greville Texidor’s volume of selected fiction, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. To learn anything about Greville Texidor herself, you need to read All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand, by Wellington-based writer Margot Schwass. Beautifully written, deeply researched, richly illustrated, this critical biography addresses the question of why we should care about the career of a woman writer born in England in 1902, who died by her own hand in Australia in 1964, and who in her lifetime published only seven short stories, a post- Spanish Civil War novella called These Dark Glasses, a few translations of Lorca poems, and a smattering of other non-fiction pieces. Schwass also tackles the question of why we should care about Greville Texidor as a New Zealand writer

Regions, Maps, Readers: Theorizing Middlebrow Geography

This article argues that endpaper maps in children’s and adult’s fictions, read in terms of the material contexts of the novels they illustrate and their specific historical contexts, point to new ways of conceiving and organizing middlebrow studies in relation to nation and region. It urges scholars interested in developing middlebrow studies beyond Anglophone cultures to pay greater attention to the materials and material cultures of the book. Based on a case study of endpaper maps by the English wood engraver Joan Hassall and illustrator E. H. Shepard, in novels by Francis Brett Young and A. A. Milne, respectively, it seeks to answer these questions: What kinds of illustrations, papers, endpapers, and designs, conveyed through what kinds of varied artistic, industrial, and commercial processes, are required for consumers in diverse regions to behold an object that they recognize as a “middlebrow book”? How are these materials and processes distinguished by region and more importantly, how do these materials and processes themselves produce ideologies of region? In short, how do book materials and processes create different kinds of regional middlebrows

Rural Modernity in Britain: Introduction by Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much - if not more - than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced economic depression, the expansion of transportation and communication networks, the roll out of electricity, the loss of land, and the erosion of local identities. Who celebrated these changes? Who resisted them? Who documented them? The Introduction maps the theoretical and historical terrain upon which the chapters rest. Essays in this collection treat film, illustration, painting, commercial print objects, architecture, murals, textiles, pageants, radio, and literature, among other subjects. Together, they make the case that the rural means more than just the often-studied countryside of southern England, a retreat from the consequences of modernity; rather, the rural emerges as a source for new versions of the modern, with an active role in the formation and development of British experiences and representations of modernity