The Puzzleheaded Girl single work   novella  
Issue Details: First known date: 1965... 1965 The Puzzleheaded Girl
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Works about this Work

'Reality is Monstrous' : Christina Stead's Critique of the Triumphant West in The Puzzleheaded Girl Michael Ackland , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 27 no. 1 2013; (p. 11-17) Ackland talks about the publishing decline of Christina Stead's career due to her worsening political and economic situation. Midway through the 1960s, Stead's career was perilously poised. For more than a decade nothing new had appeared from her pen. This was a striking hiatus for a writer who previously had been producing novels at a rate of one every two or three year. Here, Ackland attempts first to establish Stead's political position and opinion of the post-war consensus that had emerged in the US before endeavouring to trace the impact of these attitudes on her depictions of contemporary society in The Puzzleheaded Girl.' (Editor's abstract)
More Lives than One Anne Holden Rønning , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 63 no. 3 2003; (p. 110-119) The author examines papers from the manuscript collection of the Australian National Library in her discussion of Stead's portrayal of her women characters.
Christina Stead : Selected Fiction and Nonfiction : Introduction R. G. Geering , Anita Kristina Segerberg , 1994 single work criticism
— Appears in: Christina Stead : Selected Fiction and Nonfiction 1994; (p. xi-xxv ia,)
"Caught But Not Caught": Psychology and Politics in Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" Judith Kegan Gardiner , 1992 single work criticism
— Appears in: World Literature Written in English , Spring vol. 32 no. 1 1992; (p. 26-41)
Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" : The Political Context Michael Wilding , 1989 single work criticism
— Appears in: Words and Wordsmiths : A Volume for H.L. Rogers 1989; (p. 147-173) Studies in Classic Australian Fiction 1997; (p. 187-220) 'The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender,232 to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America),233 and to her left-wing politics.234 Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl (1968). The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied in the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized compulsive, seemingly unwilled and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on or descant to material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those Ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fullness free from any ponderousness: and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.'  (Introduction)
More Lives than One Anne Holden Rønning , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 63 no. 3 2003; (p. 110-119) The author examines papers from the manuscript collection of the Australian National Library in her discussion of Stead's portrayal of her women characters.
"Caught But Not Caught": Psychology and Politics in Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" Judith Kegan Gardiner , 1992 single work criticism
— Appears in: World Literature Written in English , Spring vol. 32 no. 1 1992; (p. 26-41)
Christina Stead : Selected Fiction and Nonfiction : Introduction R. G. Geering , Anita Kristina Segerberg , 1994 single work criticism
— Appears in: Christina Stead : Selected Fiction and Nonfiction 1994; (p. xi-xxv ia,)
Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" : The Political Context Michael Wilding , 1989 single work criticism
— Appears in: Words and Wordsmiths : A Volume for H.L. Rogers 1989; (p. 147-173) Studies in Classic Australian Fiction 1997; (p. 187-220) 'The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender,232 to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America),233 and to her left-wing politics.234 Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl (1968). The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied in the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized compulsive, seemingly unwilled and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on or descant to material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those Ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fullness free from any ponderousness: and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.'  (Introduction)
'Reality is Monstrous' : Christina Stead's Critique of the Triumphant West in The Puzzleheaded Girl Michael Ackland , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 27 no. 1 2013; (p. 11-17) Ackland talks about the publishing decline of Christina Stead's career due to her worsening political and economic situation. Midway through the 1960s, Stead's career was perilously poised. For more than a decade nothing new had appeared from her pen. This was a striking hiatus for a writer who previously had been producing novels at a rate of one every two or three year. Here, Ackland attempts first to establish Stead's political position and opinion of the post-war consensus that had emerged in the US before endeavouring to trace the impact of these attitudes on her depictions of contemporary society in The Puzzleheaded Girl.' (Editor's abstract)
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