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Banned in Australia
Notes
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Epigraph: L'expérience te manque, et malheureusement/ c'est une chose qui ne s'acquiert qu'à force/ de sottises et de bévues!/ Le Paysan et la Paysanne Pervertis/ Réstif de la Bretonne
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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y
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.
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New York Picaresque : The Cosmopolitanism of Christina Stead's Letty Fox : Her Luck
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 32 no. 1/2 2018; (p. 297-316)'Letty Fox: Her Luck was Christina Stead's sixth novel. It was published in October 1946, a year after the end of World War II. It is set in Manhattan and was largely written there (Rowley 246, 282). Stead had come to New York not from Sydney, her home city, but via England and continental Europe, where she had lived with her longtime partner (and later husband), William Blake. Blake was a Jewish American broker, economist, and writer, and Hitler's pursuit of Lebensraum had persuaded the couple to quit the continent for the United States. As confirmed Europhiles, they found the adjustment difficult at times. Both Stead and Blake made sporadic forays away from the city in search of work, trying their hands at screenwriting for MGM in California, for example, and writing applications for Guggenheim grants (Rowley 267). Stead also taught courses on the novel at New York University.' (Introduction)
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I Don’t Even Get Bananas
2017
single work
review
— Appears in: London Review of Books , 2 November vol. 39 no. 21 2017; (p. 15-16)
— Review of The Man Who Loved Children 1940 single work novel ; Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel‘She was famous for being neglected,’ Lorna Sage once said of Christina Stead. In 1955, Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in the New Republic, described trying to obtain Stead’s address from her last American publisher. Only a few years before the New Yorker had called her ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf’. Yet, Hardwick wrote, ‘the information came forth with a tomba oscura note: all they had was a poste restante, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1947 … She is, as they say, not in the picture.’ Randall Jarrell tried to revive interest in Stead a few years later with a laudatory essay about The Man Who Loved Children (1940).Stead wrote to him: ‘It is quite the loveliest thing that ever happened to me in “my literary life”. That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life different from any other life.’ Jonathan Franzen did his part in 2010, with a rapturous essay in the New York Times about the same book. ‘I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it,’ he wrote. In response, Picador announced a new edition, with a print run in the thousands. From what I can tell, the book is not currently available in most bookshops.' (Introduction)
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The Rhetoric of Luck in Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 28 no. 1 2014; (p. 111-122, 256) 'Morrison talks about the rhetoric of Luck in Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946). The novel examines the terrain of female experience between the acquisition of sexual maturity and marriage. It is clear that the topoi of female survival and female ambition are central to this trilogy of books, and in Letty Fox: Her Luck, the framing questions of America and American politics complicate and extend these topoi. The anti-sentimental picaresque offered Stead an opportunity to return to the satirical energy that is so remarkable in House of All Nations (1938), to experiment with New York vernacular, and to anatomize various American dilemmas as she saw them: a materialistic and weak middle-class obsessed with easy success, the irritant of fake radicalism in the New York Left, and the irresistible rise and rise of gangster capitalism. Stead's use of "luck" highlights the episodic and contingent events that make up the life of her anti-heroine, but also provides a rhetorical focal point for her critique of sex and politics. "Luck" is a word at the heart of the novel's purpose as well as its action.' (Publication abstract) -
Memories and Letters : Nadine and Lina Lewin's Friendship with Christina Stead
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 28 no. 1 2014; (p. 1-12) 'Mendelson examines the correspondence between Nadine Lewin Mendelson, her mother, and Lina Lewin, her grandmother, and Christina Stead, a novelist. She says reading the letters brings her the memory of visiting her grandmother's place in New York City and sheds some light on Stead's life as a great novelist.' (Publication summary)
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Grappling with Genius
2011
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 17-18 September 2011; (p. 18-19)
— Review of Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel -
The Scintillating Stead
1982
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age Monthly Review , vol. 2 no. 5 1982; (p. 11-12)
— Review of A Little Tea, a Little Chat 1948 single work novel ; Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel ; The People with the Dogs 1952 single work novel -
[Review] For Love Alone [and] Letty Fox, Her Luck
1978
single work
review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 8 September 1978; (p. 985)
— Review of For Love Alone 1944 single work novel ; Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel -
[Review] For Love Alone [and] Letty Fox, Her Luck
1978
single work
review
— Appears in: Nation Review , 27 October-2 November 1978; (p. 21)
— Review of For Love Alone 1944 single work novel ; Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel -
[Review] For Love Alone [and] Letty Fox, Her Luck
1978
single work
review
— Appears in: New Statesman , 21 July 1978; (p. 95)
— Review of For Love Alone 1944 single work novel ; Letty Fox, Her Luck 1946 single work novel -
The Totally Incredible Obscenity of Letty Fox
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 2 no. 2003; (p. 67-79) 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. -
The Luck of Letty Fox
2001
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The New York Review of Books , 20 December vol. 48 no. 20 2001; (p. 90-93) -
Around the World
1947
single work
column
— Appears in: The Australasian Book News and Library Journal , January vol. 1 no. 7 1947; (p. 325) -
The ‘American Dilemma’: Christina Stead’s Cold War Anatomy
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 241-253)'After a year in New York in 1935-1936, Christina Stead commented that "the whole spirit of New York is opposed to the creative mind". Yet America and Americans became the matter of five of her subsequent novels. After a leftwing Australian background and a number of years in socialist milieus in London and Paris, Stead was an intriguing reader of 1940s America. In her late American work, I'm Dying Laughing (begun 1949, published 1986), Stead became that most precarious of things - a leftwing critic of the Left during the early Cold War. Desire for success and the accompanying fear of failure are thematised by Stead as "the American dilemma" - the contradictory relationship between collective action and individual survival at the heart of American national identity that she saw as no less forceful and tragic for many on the Left.' (Author's abstract)
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Reading Letty Fox in 2011
2011
single work
column
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 335 2011; (p. 27-28) Fiona Morrison champions 'the recent reissuing of "writer’s writer" Christina Stead's transnational novel Letty Fox: Her Luck'.
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New York (City),
New York (State),
cUnited States of America (USA),cAmericas,