ABSTRACT
Christina Stead was a novelist who began publishing in the Popular Front era and finished her career during the Cold War. Born in Australia, she lived most of her life, and set and published most of her novels, abroad. She wrote about three continents (Australia, Europe, and North America), developing a powerful and distinctive style and narrative technique along the way. Although few writers have more to tell us about mid-twentieth-century Western society and culture, she is not widely known, except, perhaps, as author of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and, in Australia, as author of For Love Alone (1944) as well. For all her adult life, she was a committed, if heretical, Stalinist, and her
writing was thoroughly informed by her Stalinism. This makes her a particularly fascinating and instructive case in considering relations between the modern – globalized – literary field and resistance to capitalism. In this chapter I argue that her hatred of capitalism was a basic source of her literary power. In that light, turning to a concept of the global literary field (a.k.a. “world literature”) I uncover the institutional forces which enabled her work to circulate into the Cold War as well as those that blocked her reputation from fully flourishing. This requires me not just to present quite a detailed account of her career and oeuvre but to examine a development of the modern literary field, posthumous to Stead, within which a wider economic and cultural globalization intersected with what Goethe long ago named “world literature.”1
