This introductory essay situates the contributors' articles in relation to

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Up to a certain point, in Frame's version, their interaction retained an element of experimentation and even mutual appropriation: Frame served Money's professional curiosity, compassion and ambition; Money served Frame's need for recognition as a writer. But Frame's vulnerability became acutely exposed when Money, with the best intentions, inducted Frame into the mid-twentieth century New Zealand mental health system, setting off a chain of events climaxing in the now-iconic escape from a prefrontal leucotomy.

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This article relates Raymond Williams’s concept of “selective tradition” to the shaping of literary history in Aotearoa New Zealand. It makes the case for the ongoing salience of Williams’s narrative of modernity as a “long revolution,” and his sense of the threats to democratic and cultural participation around the turn of the 21st century, as a framework for situating recent cultural politics. The article closes with some suggestions for possible future directions for the development of locally-based materialist literary criticism.