One evening in December 2015, following a symposium on Christina Stead (‘Re-Discovering Again’), participants and members of the public gathered at the University of New South Wales’s Io Myers Studio for a sold-out writers’ panel. For over an hour the audience listened enthralled as Delia Falconer, Gail Jones and David Malouf seemed to forget where they were and plunged, in the way only fellow writers can, into the fiercely libidinal and dpassionately restless element that is Stead’s writing. In tandem with the symposium that generated this special ALS issue, this lively scene of writerly engagement demonstrated the cultural significance and maturity of Christina Stead studies in the present moment.

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Published 7 December 2016 in Rediscovering Christina Stead. Subjects: Christina Stead.

Cite as: Rooney, Brigid and Fiona Morrison. ‘Introduction.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 31, no. 6, 2016, doi: 10.20314/als.7be4410aa2.

  • Brigid Rooney — Brigid Rooney is an Associate Professor (Affiliate) with the Department of English at the University of Sydney, and author of *Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity* (2018).