'Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.
'Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (MUP).
Unit Suitable For AC: Senior Secondary Literature (Unit 4)
Curriculum Summary
Find a summary table for Australian Curriculum: English content descriptions and NSW Syllabus outcomes for this unit.
Themes
adolescence, childhood, coming of age, family, relationships, teenagers, trauma
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Intercultural understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
Written as an introduction to the 1965 reprint of The Man Who Loved Children, American critic Jarrell's 'enthusiastic' essay stimulated a revaluation of Christina Stead's work. (Oxford Companion to Australian Literature). The essay has been reprinted in numerous editions of the novel since 1965.
'This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.' (Publication abstract)
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.
Written as an introduction to the 1965 reprint of The Man Who Loved Children, American critic Jarrell's 'enthusiastic' essay stimulated a revaluation of Christina Stead's work. (Oxford Companion to Australian Literature). The essay has been reprinted in numerous editions of the novel since 1965.
