First, quite paradoxically it seems, characters are more often than not feeling estranged from their own community, as if exiled from their own kin. This is the case in Alan Duff’s trilogy: Once Were Warriors (1990), What Becomes of the Broken Hearted (1996), and Jake’s Long Shadow (2002). (1957, 60)Ģ The transposition of the genre of the novel to the Pacific literary context entails that characters have different experiences of subjectivity.

The existence of such a society, in turn, obviously depends on an ideology primarily based, not on the tradition of the past, but on the autonomy of the individual, irrespective of his particular social status or personal capacity. The concept of individualism posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of every individual’s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from that multifarious allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’ ‒ a force that is always social, not individual. The genre of the novel developed as a response to the social and historical changes European society experienced at that time, as explained further by Watt: Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) points out the individualistic turn of the Renaissance in Europe: he observes that “from the Renaissance onwards, there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality” (1957, 15). Such a shift was not only thematic but also became intertwined with questions of genre, specifically that of the novel, which was considered as the European genre par excellence.

Thus, Witi Ihimaera was the first Māori writer to extensively use Māori mythology in his novel The Whale Rider (1987). 1 In Aotearoa/New Zealand literature, the Renaissance movement that started in the 1970s was marked by the return to Māori cultural elements in novels written by emerging Māori writers.

Warriors by Alan Duff