Christina Stead and the Matter of America

Description

Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation 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, America provoked Stead 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.

Fiona Morrison is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales. Her books include Masters in Pieces: The English Canon for the Twenty-First Century (with Michael Parker) and, as editor, Dorothy Hewett: Selected Prose. She is the non-fiction editor of Southerly and president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

"a highly informed, astute study of one of the giants of world literature." -- Steven Carroll * Sydney Morning Herald * 'Morrison's book further develops an understanding of the American years and of Stead's profound engagement with the nation in a critical period of history.' -- Anne Pender * Australian Book Review * 'Christina Stead and the Matter of America is a book that needed to be written. It will make you want to read Stead's American novels - whether again, or for the first time. It is immensely readable, packed with juicy passages and incisive observations, responding to the energy and fearsome intellect of Stead's work.' -- Dr Brigid Rooney * mETAphor * "Morrison argues that Stead saw her Australian-ness itself as her licence to write about the world. Australia's being an island continent gave Australians a mercurial transnationalism: Stead's colonial identity was therefore a central ideological motivation in her US-set fictional endeavours." -- Madeleine Gray * Times Literary Supplement *