Cirrus@Austlit

'Having grown up in Sydney in the first decades of the twentieth century, Christina Stead left Australia in 1928 at the age of twenty-six and returned only forty years later. Critical responses to Stead’s work tended to repress her Australianness, even when those critical responses came from Australians themselves; in 1948, Nettie Palmer commented on walking past an “impressive shopfront showing American and English classics and moderns in good editions: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Quixote (English), Christina Stead, Thackeray” (Palmer 149). Stead’s first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is the least ambiguously Australian of all her works, centered on a group of workers at a printing press in Sydney in the 1920s. This novel is important in the history of Australian literary fiction, arriving early in the development of an ossified split between modernist and realist modes—a split that was to become a defining schism of Australian literature in the subsequent decades. The social, political, and cultural tensions that fed the perceived split between modernist and realist writing in Australia—tensions that revolved around the role of organized left-wing politics in social life and the relationship of Australia to modernity and empire—receive a deep and extended treatment in Stead’s novel. These tensions play out at a formal level in the coexistence of both realist and modernist strategies of representation in Stead’s novel, strategies deeply influenced by Stead’s reading of both nineteenth-century French realist fiction and the modernist avant-garde. The challenge when reading Seven Poor Men of Sydney is to be sensitive to both the European literary and intellectual tradition that undoubtedly nourished her work and the Australian context out of which it was born.'