Lawrence Jones

I was born (1934) and educated in California: BA Pomona College, 1952-56; MA, PhD UCLA, 1956-62. I was an Assistant Professor of English at Linfield College, 1961-64, I became Lecturer in English at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and have lived in Dunedin ever since. I advanced from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer to Associate Professor to Professor until retirement in 1999. I taught mostly Victorian, American and New Zealand literatures, and initiated the courses in the latter two. I became an Emeritus Professor in 2000 and for some years lectured in graduate courses, mostly in New Zealand literature.

My PhD thesis was on the fiction of Thomas Hardy and I published papers on his work in American journals. However since 1970 New Zealand literature has been my major research interest, and I have published numerous essays, reference book entries and reviews in that area, as well as the section on the novel in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991,1998). I have edited a novel by Dan Davin (1976), the stories of O.E.Middleton (2008), an anthology of South Island writing (1995), a history of the Robert Burns Fellowship (2008) , and edited/co-edited The Journal of New Zealand Literature (1990-2000). I have published a collection of critical essays, Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose (1987), a literary history, Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945, and am at work on a study of Maurice Gee's prose fiction for adult readers. essays and reviews in that area, and