Christina Stead and the Matter of America

Winner of the Walter McRae Russel Award 2021

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 Steadâs mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality.

In this examination of Steadâs American work, Fiona Morrison explores Steadâs profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her ârestlessly experimentalâ style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the âmatterâ of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity.

"This superb study of Steadâs fiction not only significantly advances scholarship on Stead but is a significant analysis of mid-twentieth-century fiction in its own right ... Brilliantly researched, written and argued, Morrisonâs book offers a testimony to the capacities of literary scholarship to map the tectonic movement of ideas that shaped the modern world system." Tony Hughes-d''Aeth and panel, Walter McRae Russel Award

This is the first critical study to focus on Steadâs time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Steadâs American novels âreveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth centuryâ, and that Steadâs account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.