Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Butterfly Effect


Wow. I am finding it hard to keep up with all the publishing on Janet Frame in the past year or so! Here is another book that has recently been pointed out to me. This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at an international conference at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, in October 2010, as well as additional essays.

Janet Frame once called the process of writing stories 'more like chasing butterflies or mosquitoes than nettng a swarm of words ... I "capture" them by writing down their titles.' (Letter to Tim Curnow, 1989)

From this quotation comes the title for the latest scholarly volume on Janet Frame:

Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame's The Lagoon and Other Stories ed. Vanessa Guignery (Publibook 2011)

See a preview on Amazon UK:

Publisher's Blurb:
In 1951, Janet Frame published her first book The Lagoon and Other Stories, a collection which would win the most prestigious national literary award in New Zealand and launch her fascinating career. The essays collected in this volume examine the motifs at work in Frame’s short stories and unravel a unique literary world which revisits the realist tradition and grants prose a poetic dimension.
As much a reflexion about language, voice, modes of writing and narrative strategies as an analysis of Frame’s recurrent concerns with identity, childhood, relationships between mothers and daughters, secrecy, marginality, community or death, Chasing Butterflies is a great tribute to one of the most famous New Zealand writers.

 

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