Christina Stead : Satirist
Altona
:
Common Ground
,
2002
Z960254
2002
single work
criticism
Reviews Stead's novels as inheritors of the tradition of Roman satire, arguing that Stead's satirical fiction presents a contemporary view of her own historical period from 1930 until the Cold War. Drawing on Stead's notes, diaries and manuscripts, Pender examines several of Stead's novels and her English short stories and puts forward an argument about the centrality of satire to Stead's discourse about culture and history. She also draws attention to the intellectual rigour and encyclopaedic breadth and vision evident in Stead's fiction and demonstrates Stead's significant contribution to the radical novel in the twentieth century.
Report of the October meeting includes three books reviews and a tribute to Davidson.
It was noted that the economic textbook Money by Mills and Walker had recently become the first Australian textbook to be used in an English University (Cambridge).
'In three years Christina Stead has written three books—The Salzburg Tales, 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1935, and The Beauties and Furies, 1936—and they bring a new note into Australian fiction. The first is a collection of stories, told by pilgrims to the Mozart festival in Salzburg and held together by a slight and purely formal framework. The stories are set in many places, real and mythical, in this world and the next, and some are Australian. Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a novel, a pattern of lives, of thoughts and emotions, shown against a curiously patterned backcloth of Sydney. The Beauties and Furies is the first volume of a proposed picture in three volumes of student love, and is set in Paris. (Introduction)
