Quarrels with Himself

`I know now that later in life I will write prose and good prose,' declared the nineteen-year-old James K. Baxter. And he did. The 2015 publication of Baxter's Complete Prose reveals his remarkable range and depth across everything from personal, informal jottings to highly crafted literary essays and political polemics. Quarrels with Himself provides a dozen essays that uncover how much more complicated Baxter is than his popular stereotype, and how his prose writing (like his poetry) wrestles with contradictions, anxieties and competing impulses just as he wrestled with the society in which he lived, or from which he withdrew. Essays by Janet Wilson, Sharon Matthews, Paul Millar, Lawrence Jones, John Davidson, Nicholas Wright, Hugh Roberts, Kirstine Moffat, Paul Morris, Doreen D'Cruz, Peter Whiteford, and Greg O'Brien, with an introduction by Geoffrey Miles.

Geoffrey Miles is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, where his primary interest is the reception of the classics in English literature. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, and editor of Classical Mythology in English Literature.

Peter Whiteford is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has previously edited Vibrant with Words: The Letters of Ursula Bethell (2005) and John Mulgan's war memoir Report on Experience (2010).

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