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CHANGING THE SUBJECT: THE EARLY NOVELS OF CHRISTINA STEAD (POLITICS/ART, 1930'S, SURREALISM)
Abstract
Christina Stead is a modernist whose life and art are profoundly informed by socialism. Chapter I describes the intellectual context into which Stead fits: the debates about art and partisanship which occupied leftwing intellectuals in Europe in the thirties. Georg Lukacs' theories about totality and mediation are compared to the counter-arguments of Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin, especially Benjamin's project: a critical practice informed by Marxist dialectic and by sympathy toward modernist experiments like surrealism. The whole chapter discusses the relationship between ideology and realism. Chapter II is a biography. Christina Stead's childhood in Sydney, her residence in Europe from 1928 until 1937 and her encounter with Hollywood anti-communism are focal points. The method compares interviews with autobiographical fragments and with passages from Stead's novels, mainly Seven Poor Men of Sydney, The Beauties and Furies and For Love Alone. Chapter III examines The Beauties and Furies, showing how Stead's trios of lovers in Paris interweave in the political ferment of the Third Republic. Close textual study combined with historical research establishes the novel is at once realistic and surreal, featuring subtle interactions between characters that bear the stamp of both individual psychology and social class. Surreal fantasy enters the realistic text to exhibit personalities in the flux of change, and under stress. Chapter IV shows House of All Nations similarly blends realism and fantasy to expose the "money galls" of international banking, in a world rumor rules. An appendix demonstrates this long novel is very carefully plotted. In conclusion, the thesis proposes Stead's unusual effects, the changes in the subjects and the rapid shifts from one subject to another, emerge from her early education in Darwinian biology together with the marxist social theories she absorbed from reading and discussion in college and in Paris. Her vision has a double focus on the individual and the environment.
Subject Area
Literature
Recommended Citation
DIZARD, DEBORAH ROBIN, "CHANGING THE SUBJECT: THE EARLY NOVELS OF CHRISTINA STEAD (POLITICS/ART, 1930'S, SURREALISM)" (1984). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8500069.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8500069