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Winner of the Walter McRae Russel Award 2021
Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead鈥檚 mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality.
In this examination of Stead鈥檚 American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead鈥檚 profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her 鈥渞estlessly experimental鈥� style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the 鈥渕atter鈥� of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity.
"This superb study of Stead鈥檚 fiction not only significantly advances scholarship on Stead but is a significant analysis of mid-twentieth-century fiction in its own right ... Brilliantly researched, written and argued, Morrison鈥檚 book offers a testimony to the capacities of literary scholarship to map the tectonic movement of ideas that shaped the modern world system." Tony Hughes-d'Aeth and panel, Walter McRae Russel Award
This is the first critical study to focus on Stead鈥檚 time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead鈥檚 American novels 鈥渞eveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century鈥�, and that Stead鈥檚 account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.
Fiona Morrison is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney, where she has taught and supervised in the areas of postcolonial and world literatures, Australian literature and women鈥檚 writing. Her most recent book, Christina Stead and the Matter of America (2019), won the Walter McRae Russell Award in 2021 (ASAL). She is currently working on a book-length study of Henry Handel Richardson.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Christina Stead鈥檚 鈥淲estward Expansion鈥�: Totality, avant-garde realism and the American folk
2. Fascist miscellanies and the allegory of the domestic front in The Man Who Loved Children
3. Debt, domestic enclosure and daughterly revolution in The Man Who Loved Children
4. The New York love market and the Picara Fortunata in Letty Fox: Her Luck
5. Men, mobility and capital relations A Little Tea, A Little Chat and The People with the Dogs
6. Gargantuan contradictions and the supercession of limits in I鈥檓 Dying Laughing
Conclusion
About the author
Works cited
Index
鈥渁 highly informed, astute study of one of the giants of world literature.鈥漇teven Carroll鈥楳orrison鈥檚 book further develops an understanding of the American years and of Stead鈥檚 profound engagement with the nation in a critical period of history.鈥橝nne Pender'Christina Stead and the Matter of America is a book that needed to be written. It will make you want to read Stead鈥檚 American novels 鈥� whether again, or for the first time. It is immensely readable, packed with juicy passages and incisive observations, responding to the energy and fearsome intellect of Stead鈥檚 work.'Brigid RooneyMorrison argues that Stead saw her Australian-ness itself as her licence to write about the world. Australia's being an island continent gave Australians a mercurial transnationalism: Stead's colonial identity was therefore a central ideological motivation in her US-set fictional endeavours.Madeleine Gray
Size: 254 x 178 mm
Pages: 186
Copyright: 2019
ISBN: 9781743324493
Publication: 01 Oct 2019
Series: Sydney Studies in Australian Literature