'Living on the seamier side of New York in 1941, Robert Grant is a middle-aged man to whom life is a game in which he makes his own rules. This is no more evident than in the pursuit of his only hobby: the search for, seduction and betrayal of women. His targets are always 'easy', the cheaper the better. He is constantly on the lookout for a new face, a new phone number, 'a little tea, a little chat'. While Grant gets a certain thrill from his intrigues, he receives little pleasure - and gives none, until he meets Barbara, the 'blondine', a large, goodlooking but sluttish woman of thirty-two. In Barbara, he meets his match. First published in 1948, "A Little Tea, A Little Chat" provides an irresistible, sardonic commentary on men and women on the make whose sexual appetites wickedly mirror the materialism of twentieth-century America.' (Publication summary)
Christina Stead and the Matter of America
Sydney
:
Sydney University Press
,
2019
17267523
2019
multi chapter work
criticism
'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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'After a year in New York in 1935-1936, Christina Stead commented that "the whole spirit of New York is opposed to the creative mind". Yet America and Americans became the matter of five of her subsequent novels. After a leftwing Australian background and a number of years in socialist milieus in London and Paris, Stead was an intriguing reader of 1940s America. In her late American work, I'm Dying Laughing (begun 1949, published 1986), Stead became that most precarious of things - a leftwing critic of the Left during the early Cold War. Desire for success and the accompanying fear of failure are thematised by Stead as "the American dilemma" - the contradictory relationship between collective action and individual survival at the heart of American national identity that she saw as no less forceful and tragic for many on the Left.' (Author's abstract)
Christina Stead: The American Years
1990
Z67027
1990
single work
thesis
