SOURCE: “Keri Hulme's The Bone People: A Critique of Gender,” in Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, edited by M.-T. Bindella and G. V. Davis, Rodopi, 1993, pp. 219-31.

Covi is a PhD. candidate at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In the following essay, she discusses Hulme's unconventional treatment of gender and ethnicity in The Bone People.

When Keri Hulme's first novel, The Bone People, was finally published in 1984, it quickly attracted both passionate fans and hostile detractors. This polarized response focused almost entirely on extra-textual considerations.

The novel was initially rejected by three established New Zealand publishers before Spiral, a small feminist collective formed specifically for the purpose, published it. Promoted as a feminist text by a Maori writer, the book enjoyed surprising commercial success. It was first reprinted and then issued in a second edition, this time with...