Christina Stead and the Matter of America

Christina Stead and the Matter of America PDF Author: Fiona Morrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781743325193
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation of Stead's American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her 'restlessly experimental' style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, America provoked Stead to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead's time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead's American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century, and that Stead's account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

Christina Stead and the Matter of America

Christina Stead and the Matter of America PDF Author: Fiona Morrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781743325193
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation of Stead's American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her 'restlessly experimental' style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, America provoked Stead to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead's time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead's American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century, and that Stead's account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

Christina Stead and the Matter of America

Christina Stead and the Matter of America PDF Author: Fiona Morrison
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743324502
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
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’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality. In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

The Man Who Loved Children

The Man Who Loved Children PDF Author: Christina Stead
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453265252
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 733

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Book Description
“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers. Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by Newsweek, Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era The Glass Castle. In the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”

Letty Fox

Letty Fox PDF Author: Christina Stead
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
ISBN: 0522860540
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 761

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Book Description
One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. Letty Fox: Her Luck, Christina Stead's sixth novel, was first published in New York in 1946, and banned in Australia for its salaciousness. Set in wartime Manhattan and told in Letty's own spiky and exuberant voice, the novel follows her successes and failures in the game of 'being somebody'. Letty's tireless pursuit of love and sex provides the setting for Stead's brilliant satire of marriage, desire and the conventions that surround them.

Speculative Time

Speculative Time PDF Author: Paul Crosthwaite
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198891792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.

The Salzburg Tales

The Salzburg Tales PDF Author: Christina Stead
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 0522869556
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A group of visitors to the Salzburg Festival, brought together by chance, decides to mark time by telling tales. Their fantasies, legends, tragedies, jokes and parodies come together as The Salzburg Tales. Dazzling in their richness and vitality, the tales are grounded in Christina Stead's belief that 'the story is magical . what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one'. Originally published eighty years ago, these are thoroughly modern stories that invite comparison with Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Salzburg Tales are published here with a new introduction by Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead.

Middlebrow Modernism

Middlebrow Modernism PDF Author: Melinda J. Cooper
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743328575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Eleanor Dark (1901–85) is one of Australia’s most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark’s contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976. Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark’s writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark’s writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism. Melinda Cooper argues that Dark’s fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century. Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark’s fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.

Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism

Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism PDF Author: Meg Brayshaw
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303064426X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology

Liar & Spy

Liar & Spy PDF Author: Rebecca Stead
Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books
ISBN: 0375899537
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller from the author of the Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me: a story about spies, games, and friendship. The first day Georges (the S is silent) moves into a new Brooklyn apartment, he sees a sign taped to a door in the basement: SPY CLUB MEETING—TODAY! That’s how he meets his twelve-year-old neigh­bor Safer. He and Georges quickly become allies—and fellow spies. Their assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer’s requests become more and more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend? “Will touch the hearts of kids and adults alike.” —NPR Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more!

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel PDF Author: David Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009093207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 826

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.