The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
The article reviews Stead's scholarship and gives a close reading of The Little Hotel, discussing the use of synecdoche to 'portray the economic, sexual, and gender structures' of society and viewing the novel 'through the lenses of two contemporary theorists of masculinity, Australian sociologist Bob Connell and the late French post-structural theorist, Pierre Bourdieu' (p.13).
Discusses the literary aspirations and successes of Christina Stead's protagonists and their relationship to Stead's own ambitions for I'm Dying Laughing.
Ackland aims to demonstrate the way in which Stead's writings 'simultaneously exploit and subvert the traditions and conventions available to her'. Concentrating on 'The Marionettist', the first of the Salzburg tales, with its recasting of the puppeteer motif, he detects the influence of Hoffmann on Stead; he find the story 'hints at a range of ensuing pre-occupations, and evokes a past imaginative realm that affords one measure of the existential slippages and social developments that have complicated received themes in a modern, increasingly psychoanalytical age.' pp.53-54.
Published in 1946 in New York, Letty Fox : Her Luck was declared a prohibited import by Australia in mid-1947. Moore discusses the procedures involved in the banning and the compexity of what was at issue for Australian officials.
'Stead did not publish the kind of literary criticism that would help us reconcile her practice as a novelist with her political commitment. Her most important public comment on her art is probably the notes for her speech to the League of American Writers' Congress in June 1939, entitled "Uses of the Many-Charactered Novel" where she argues for a "novel of strife" that offers multiple viewpoints rather than a thesis, leaving readers to make their own conclusions' (p.81).
Examines some Stead correspondence relating to a proposed translation of Seven Poor Men of Sydney into Japanese that did not eventuate 'due to the financial difficulties and eventual collapse of the intended publisher' (p.99).
This paper 'draws on epistolary theory, and theories of epistolary fiction, of women's letter writing, of autobiography and autobiographical memory. Concerned as it is with women's letters, lives and fiction - specifically Elizabeth Jolley's Georges' Wife trilogy - it became a tribute not only to Dorothy Green, but also to Elizabeth Jolley herself' (p.105).
Taylor examines Meston's journalism and concludes that 'Beyond its complex construction of Aboriginality, Meston's writing for the press comprised many rich cultural layers, including the constitution of the author's persona, his masculinist assumptions, his promotion of Queensland, the paradox of his natural history and shooting articles, his deployment of sources, and the generic dissemination of his views through rhetoric, poetry and fiction. Deeper penetration of these layers might enhance understanding of the discursive operations of power in Australia during a crucial development phase' (p. 131).
'In Australian fictions, "the tropics" feature as paradisiacal retreats, mosquito-infested war zones, touristic destinations or sites-of-last-resort on terminal pathways north. But they are also homelands and cross-cultural spaces where the nexus between Indigenous and non-indigenous people, as well as the environment, climate and geography, is distinctive ... This paper considers "the tropics" as contested sites in Australia and New Guinea, and indicates tensions between writing about or from within homelands' (p.167).
