Christina Stead

The Middle Ages have proved to be imaginatively a fluid and artistically enticing entity. As Umberto Eco has underscored, many have turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration and diverse forms of confirmation (66-72). These range trom nostalgia-enshrouded models of…

Christina Stead's fictions continue to puzzle and fascinate her readers. Following in the traditions of debate first sparked by Hazel Rowley's controversial biography, these two new texts reveal the polarities that continue to divide Stead studies. Teresa Petersen, like Rowley…

Hazel Rowley's biography of Christina Stead has generated very divergent responses in its early reviews. Michael Wilding in the Australian Book Review (152, July 1993) complains that Rowley 'utterly fails to see the significance of Stead's aesthetic. She is limited…

The Magic Phrase: Critical Articles on Christina Stead, edited by Margaret Harris, appears in the Studies in Australian Literature series (UQP), tile only regular series remaining tiJ.at is devoted to critical monographs. In view of the existence of a…

With specific reference to Virgil’s Eclogues, Paul Alpers argues that ‘the poetics of pastoral can tell us something about poetics in general’ (The Singer of the Eclogues 6). He equates song with voice when he discusses aspects of…

Education is a recurring concern in Stead's fiction, but nowhere is it more prominent as a theme than in her unpublished and largely ignored manuscript, ‘The Young Man Will Go Far’. Coterminous with her early novels, its incomplete segments afford…

This selection of Christina Stead's student publications was edited by Margaret Harris to accompany her essay, 'Christina Stead's Earliest Publications.'

In Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Christina Stead evokes the city’s history in her naming of the Tank Stream Press, the novel’s central location. The fresh water Tank Stream assured the colony’s survival in its fledgling years; however, it…

This essay offers new insights into Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and in particular its celebrated ‘lecture on light.’ It illuminates the historical context of Stead’s first novel, via reactions to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as…

The principal subject of the novel Stead spent much of her later years working on, published after her death, I'm Dying Laughing, is marked by the crisis of the Western left. As the son of one committed leftist and…

This essay examines some recent attempts to devise a new critical approach to Stead’s fiction which can encompass both the socialism she endorsed and the feminism she rejected, and asks how these approaches attempt to account for the affective as…

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…

The voices of children in The Man Who Loved Children allow Christina Stead to re-imagine her childhood and also to provide a platform for representing the struggles of children more broadly. Using a diverse range of narrative techniques Stead orchestrates…

This essay explores repetition, in both content and technique, in Christina Stead’s novel, The Man Who Loved Children. I indicate how the Pollit family is shown to repeat itself and societal structures through language, ceremony, and family folklore. Content…

Critics who value Christina Stead’s radical politics often find the passionate excess and the spectral and ambiguous qualities that attend her fiction harder to explain. The political dimensions of Stead’s fiction are further complicated by a scene of writing –…

Published in New York to muted praise in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was re-issued in 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston with a long and impassioned introduction by the poet and presiding lion of American literary criticism, Randall…