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…

Christina Stead is one of the major innovatory prose writers in English of this century. This needs stating at the outset, since her stature, distinction…

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…

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)…

The Magic Phrase: Critical Articles on Christina Stead, edited by Margaret Harris, appears in the Studies in Australian Literature series (UQP), tile only regular…

In a long and detailed interview, Stead discusses among other topics her peripatetic career, literary influences, her relationship to Australia and childhood in Sydney.

With specific reference to Virgil’s Eclogues, Paul Alpers argues that ‘the poetics of pastoral can tell us something about poetics in general’ (The…

Education is a recurring concern in Stead's fiction, but nowhere is it more prominent as a theme than in her unpublished and largely ignored manuscript…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…