Fleur Adcock

This study discusses Adcock as a writer who draws on her experiences of dislocation in order to position herself between cultures. It relocates her work within the postwar British poetic mainstream by emphasizing that her radically displaced feminized consciousness can be identified as metonymic of national and cultural differences.
Janet Wilson argues that diasporic voices such as hers, which renegotiate boundaries between self and other, although originating from white settler colonies like New Zealand, now belong to multicultural Britain. Her close readings of Adcock's verse in terms of its ironic double vision, focus on the blend of classical restraint, wit, and humour in relation to her complex revaluation of the diasporic imaginary of the exile. In arguing that Adcock's personal mythology - based on her divided nationality and gendered consciousness - separates her from modernist exile writers like James Joyce and her fellow expatriate Katherine Mansfield, and aligns her with contemporary, transnational figures like the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, the Australian-born poet Peter Porter, and V.S. Naipaul, Wilson claims that hers is a voice for our times.

Janet Wilson taught at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.