Abstract
Expatriate Christina Stead’s novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) was written across three continents and promoted by Sylvia Beach of Paris’s famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore, but largely ignored in its home country until Stead was reclaimed as a national literary icon in the early 1960s. Set in 1925, the novel’s large cast of characters ramble through a city that seems simultaneously old and new, ordered and wild, progressive and archaic. The novel’s baroque intensity is generated by the waterway, which for Stead is a primal presence in the city and a dynamic aesthetic force. This chapter shows how the novel’s content and form are structured by aqueous dynamics of blockage and flow, submersion and elevation that correspond with the novel’s unsteady mix of hope and despair.
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Notes
- 1.
Sue Doyle quotes a Sydney Morning Herald article from the early twentieth century, describing parts of inner Sydney as ‘exhibiting “the very worst conditions which are usually only associated with mediaeval cities of heavy antiquity”’ (2005).
- 2.
Hazel Rowley (2007) describes Stead’s voracious and eclectic reading as a child and adolescent. She read Dickens, Henry Lawson and the rest of what she called the ‘stockwhip and wattle-blossom school’, learned passages by heart from Milton, Byron and Keats, and later loved Guy de Maupassant, Hugo and Zola (27–36). In a 1932 letter to her cousin Gwen, Stead gushed about James Joyce, whom she called the ‘new Euphues’: ‘no living writer in English there is who is not indebted to his methods and his vocabulary’ (Stead 1992: 1951).
- 3.
Papers of Christina Stead, 1919–1996. MS4967. National Library of Australia.
- 4.
Given Nietzsche’s stated hostility towards Darwin’s theories, it may seem unlikely to link the two theorists, although I would argue that Stead sees no tension between them. In Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (2004), John Richardson maintains that much of Nietzsche’s philosophy is informed by a grounding in Darwinian naturalism.
- 5.
Barnard seems to have remembered the passage for many years: it is singled out for praise in Barnard Eldershaw’s Essays in Australian Fiction (176–177) and quoted again in her single-authored The Sydney Book (1947). In this short work, Christina Stead is the only Sydney writer referenced by name (11). Finally, Stead’s ‘lilied and reflectant tide’ from the end of the passage is invoked at the end of Sydney: The Story of a City from 1956 (79).
- 6.
‘Government and General Orders’, 15 Sept. 1810’, qtd. in Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Water Supply to the City of Sydney and Suburbs and New South Wales, 1869.
- 7.
See also Groth (2015).
- 8.
- 9.
See Esty (2012) for more on the aborted bildungsroman in modernist texts.
- 10.
See also Kirkpatrick (2000): 67.
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Brayshaw, M. (2021). The Origins of Australian Urban Modernity: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934). In: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_2
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