Re-inventing New Zealand: Essays on the arts and the media by Roger Horrocks

ISBN: 978-0-9922453-8-2
444PP - 225mm x 150mm
May 2016

With its unusual breadth and depth, this book is the harvest of a lifetime of thinking about the arts and media in New Zealand by someone with ‘a knowledge’ (says Murray Edmond) ‘that combines industry practice with academic insight in a way that is unrivalled in New Zealand.’

The book reflects on the huge changes to our culture produced by the hippie upheaval of the 1960s, new forms of feminism, the Māori renaissance, radical styles of philosophy, economic extremism, and the digital age. Such changes have transformed our literature, visual arts, music, film, and television, and re-invented our sense of place. The book offers insights into each of those arts and each of those themes.

A personal memoir by the author sets the scene for this richly varied selection of 21 essays, from 1983 to 2016.

“These essays are seminal contributions, central to the major intellectual and cultural changes th...