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Issue Details: First known date: 2000... 2000 The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Christina Stead (1902-83) is regarded worldwide as one of Australia's greatest novelists. The New Yorker called her "the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf". This is the first volume to provide an overview of Stead criticism, including pioneering 'classic' essays and critical literature from the 1980s and '90s by a range of Australian, North American and English critics.' (Publication summary)

Contents

* Contents derived from the St Lucia, Indooroopilly - St Lucia area, Brisbane - North West, Brisbane, Queensland,:University of Queensland Press , 2000 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Christina Stead and Her Critics, Margaret Harris , single work criticism

The graph of Christina Stead's writing life traces advances and retreats, peaks and troughs. The challenge for a critic at the beginning of the twenty-first century, conditioned to fissure and fragmentation, is none the less to come to terms with the discontinuities that are of the essence of the career of this Australian-born novelist who spent half of her long life in England, Europe, and the United States. This first volume of essays by various hands on the work of Christina Stead is a milestone in the complicated narrative of her critical reputation, a narrative which presents a case study in cultural politics both inside and outside the academy. The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead appears nearly seventy years after her first work of fiction, The Salzburg Tales, published in 1934; sixty years after her masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, in 1940 (and thirty-five years after its republication in 1965 resurrected her career); and nearly twenty years after her death at the age of 80 in 1983. Quite the most unusual feature of Stead's career is the separation of its two major phases by a period of thirteen years during which she was writing constantly but unable to get published. When The Man Who Loved Children was reissued in 1965, Stead had not had a book out since The People with the Dogs, her ninth work of fiction, published in 1952. Between 1965 and her death, she published three novels and a set of novellas, all written in the late 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, in the 1980s R. G. Geering, her literary executor, brought about the posthumous publication of another novel, I'm Dying Laughing, which Stead had begun by the early 1950s, and worked and reworked into the 1970s; and also collected in Ocean of Story essays and short stories, some not previously published, written at various times during her career and including pieces which date from her return to Australia to visit in 1969, and to live in 1974. The consequent mismatch between the chronologies of composition and publication of Christina Stead's work is a major factor in the vagaries of her reputation.' (Introduction)

(p. 1-22, notes 263-267)
Christina Stead, M. Barnard Eldershaw , single work criticism

'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)

(p. 23-38, notes 267)
The Achievement of Christina Stead, R. G. Geering , single work criticism biography

'We have in Christina Stead a gifted Australian writer whose books are out of print and whose work has never been published in the country of her birth. Living abroad for many years, she has had most of her novels issued in both England and the United States. Her two most recent novels, A Little Tea, A Little Chat and The People with the Dogs, were published in America alone and very few copies have been seen here. This pair, it is true, might not find a big public in Australia, but there are at least four of her books which would certainly be widely read and enjoyed by Australian readers, if only they were readily available—Seven Poor Men of Sydney, The Salzburg Tales, For Love Alone, and The Man Who Loved Children. (Introduction)

(p. 38-57, notes 267-268)
Chaos or a Dancing Star? : Christina Stead's 'Seven Poor Men of Sydney', Dorothy Green , single work criticism biography

'The review and analysis of Christina Stead's 'Seven Poor Men of Sydney' is discussed. The novel is a particularly challenging and original one, in spite of the surface influences of Joyce and Cabell.' (Abstract)

(p. 58-70, notes 268)
Representing the 1930s : Capitalism, Phallocracy, and the Politics of the Popular Front in 'House of All Nations', Louise Yelin , single work criticism (p. 71-88, notes 268-272)
Christina Stead's New Realism : The Man Who Loved Children and Cotters' England, Terry Sturm , single work criticism (p. 89-116, notes 272-273)
Language, Art and Ideas in The Man Who Loved Children, Shirley Walker , single work criticism (p. 117-132, notes 273-274)
Heaven and Hell in the Man Who Loved Children, Ken A. Stewart , single work criticism (p. 133-144, notes 274)
Male Narcissism, Capitalism, and the Daughter of The Man who Loved Children, Judith Kegan Gardiner , single work criticism (p. 145-162, notes 274-275-162, notes 274-275)
How Real is Sam Pollit? 'Dramatic Truth and 'Proces-Verbal' in 'The Man Who Loved Children', Hazel Rowley , single work criticism (p. 163-173, notes 275-277)
Christina Stead's "For Love Alone" : A Female Odyssey?, Susan Sheridan , single work criticism (p. 174-190, notes 275-277)
"A Little Tea, a Little Chat": Decadent Pleasures and the Pleasure of Decadence, Virginia Blain , single work criticism (p. 191-205, notes 278-279)
The Spirit of Cotters' England, Denise Brown , single work criticism (p. 206-223, notes 279-280)
A 'Cruel Book': Menippean satire and the female satirist in "I'm Dying Laughing", Fiona Morrison , single work criticism (p. 224-240, notes 281-282)
Resisting 'the tyranny of what is written' : Christina Stead's Fiction, Diana Brydon , single work criticism
The study 'considers two of the more controversial aspects of Stead's writing - her notion of novelistic form and her use of literary allusion - to argue that they are integral to her vision' (3).
(p. 241-250, notes 282-284)
Unhappy Families - Angela Carter on the Scope of Christina Stead's Achievement, Angela Carter , single work review
— Review of The Beauties and Furies Christina Stead , 1936 single work novel ;
(p. 251-292, notes 284)
Bibliography, Brigid Rooney , single work bibliography
Particularly useful descriptions of publishing history of Stead's work.
(p. 284-302)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Teresa Petersen, The Enigmatic Christina Stead, Me Anne Pender , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Politics and Culture , no. 2 2001;
Untitled Kate Webb , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 61 no. 2 2001; (p. 208-214)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
[Review] The Magic Phrase Anne Pender , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 68 2001; (p. 194-195) JAS Review of Books , no. 1 2001;

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
Untitled Laurie Hergenhan , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 20 no. 1 2001; (p. 132-135)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism ; Christina Stead's Politics of Place Ann Blake , 1999 single work criticism biography
Illuminating Stead Anne Pender , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Overland , Autumn no. 162 2001; (p. 97-99)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
Illuminating Stead Anne Pender , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Overland , Autumn no. 162 2001; (p. 97-99)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
Untitled Laurie Hergenhan , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 20 no. 1 2001; (p. 132-135)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism ; Christina Stead's Politics of Place Ann Blake , 1999 single work criticism biography
[Review] The Magic Phrase Anne Pender , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 68 2001; (p. 194-195) JAS Review of Books , no. 1 2001;

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
Untitled Kate Webb , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 61 no. 2 2001; (p. 208-214)

— Review of The Magic Phrase : Critical Essays on Christina Stead 2000 anthology criticism
Teresa Petersen, The Enigmatic Christina Stead, Me Anne Pender , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Politics and Culture , no. 2 2001;
Last amended 24 Feb 2017 15:06:05
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