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

In this examination of Steads American work, Fiona Morrison explores Steads 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 superb study of Steads 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, Morrisons 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 Steads time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Steads American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century, and that Steads account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.