[This excerpt is part of an essay which was originally published in Landfall in 1955.]

New Zealand criticism has been chiefly concerned with the vain and unrewarding attempt to discover signs of national characteristics and the influence of local environment in our literature, rather than with the search for meaning and the examination of the moral climate which may be related more to Western man than to the accident of locality. It has fastened its attention on problems connected with the mental and geographical isolation of New Zealanders, on the literary consequences of the struggle to break in a new country, and the implications of a high level of material prosperity; but it has less frequently occupied itself with the way in which the loss of social meaning and religious faith in Western society has produced a climate of opinion that has been having profound effects on writers whether...