Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934): Eccentric Modernism and Radical Politics in an Australian Metropolis

Synonyms

Australian literature; Christina Stead; Marxism; Modernism; Realism; Transnationalism

Definition

Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) is the debut novel by Christina Stead (1902–1983), a major twentieth-century writer of novels and short stories. The novel is notable for its innovative representation of interwar Sydney, as well as its engagement with politico-aesthetic debates that characterized the 1930s.

Christina Stead’s (1902–1983) Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) is a significant urban novel of the interwar period. Stead’s catalogue of the obscure lives of poor men and women – aspiring political radicals, print workers, students, and ne’er-do-wells – marked a radical departure for Australian literary fiction, while its innovations with form re-energized and reframed the nineteenth-century urban novel for the changed sociopolitical and material conditions of the twentieth century.

Seven Poor Men of Sydneyis perhaps the best-known example of a new kind of Australian urban...