New Zealand Renaissance: Romantic and Modernist Origins of a Cultural Nationalism, 1930–1960

Although much has been written about New Zealand’s cultural nationalism, rarely have scholars sought to understand why a cultural nationalism occurred at all. Taking up the origins of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism as its central question, this thesis explores the ways that ideas of nationalism formed and spread in the minds of New Zealand’s artists and writers. It finds that nationalism formed often unwittingly, through the search for a modernism that sought to restore the human spirit after the simultaneous devastations of war and secularisation. Key cultural figures in New Zealand looked backwards—to the Romantic era, to the American Renaissance, and to the English Musical Renaissance—in order to assert spiritual connections between the nation and the natural world. The Romantic Modernism these figures enacted led to the incidental assertion of national identity in New Zealand, as it did elsewhere.

Broadly chronological, the thesis begins by reconsidering the supposed break between New Zealand’s two eras of cultural nationalism, one in the late nineteenth century—the so-called “Maoriland” nationalism—and the other between 1930 and 1960. It ends in the 1950s as Colin McCahon and James K. Baxter sought to spiritualise the New Zealand landscape by drawing on preexisting romantic habits of mind. In-between, the thesis considers how various New Zealand “nationalist” figures—J. C. Beaglehole, E. H. McCormick, Douglas Lilburn, Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann, Frances Hodgkins and Charles Brasch—participated in a burgeoning resistance to metropolitan modernism’s uniformity and de-spiritualisation. Many of these figures were educated in England into a Romantic Modernism, through which they learned to see their cultural aims in moral and spiritual–religious terms: as guiding a public towards a more honest and unmediated relationship with people and the natural world. This alternative genealogy of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism suggests new ways of reading the period, and of connecting Pākeha New Zealand’s 1930–1960 search for national identity to similar searches elsewhere.