Bücher von Michael Ackland

Christina Stead (1902 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterizations. Stead enjoyed an international reputation in the 1930s and beyond, then went out of favor as a communist-affiliated writer, until she was rediscovered by feminist critics. Her standing is considerable, and in Australia she vies with Patrick White for the laurel of finest Australian novelist. In this book, author Michael Ackland argues that the single most important influence on Stead s life, socialism, has been seriously neglected in studies of her life and work. Ackland delves into Stead s political formation prior to her departure for London in 1928, arguing that considerable insights can be added to the known record by reviewing these years within a specifically political context, as well as by interrogating Stead s own accounts of key persons and events. He examines her novels, from Seven Poor Men of Sydney to I m Dying Laughing and The Man Who Loved Children, and focuses on Stead s conception of history, of capitalist finance, and on the significance of the key historical moments that frame her works. In tracing the trajectory of her work, Ackland illuminates how Stead was, as a well-informed Marxist critic underscored, a product of thirties. Steeped in socialist literature and steeled to withstand ideological adversity, Stead emerged at the end of the decade a strongly committed novelist, whose intellectual idealism and convictions could, as coming decades would show, long withstand privation, heartbreaks and the unwelcome lessons of history. This is an important book for collections in Australian literature, comparative literature, world literature, and women's studies.

Murray Bail is one of the most boldly innovative and intellectually challenging of contemporary writers. He is widely appreciated in his homeland, Australia. Although a casual reading of Bail's work affords shocks, laughter and stimulation aplenty, it usually raises of a host of questions that nag and tantalize readers for years to come. This is a legacy of his unambiguous declaration in favour of the novel of ideas and, above all, of bold invention and risk taking. Also his individual works can seem at first sight unrelated: a novel that recounts the world-wide peregrinations of tourists through museums, real and imaged (Homesickness); its sequel in a parodic novel of education that attacks Australian parochialism (Holden's Performance); followed by what Michael Ondaatje has called 'one of the great and most surprising courtships in literature' (Eucalyptus), and most recently the depiction of a failed attempt to live the life of an original thinker, which explores the rival interpretative claims of philosophy and psychology (The Pages). This first critical study of Murray Bail maps out the coordinates, and sheds invaluable light on, the intellectual labyrinth afforded by his novels. Its author, Michael Ackland, outlines deftly the literary and artistic heritages that influenced Bail's early thought, then traces key preoccupations in his fiction and non-fiction, as well as provides authoritative interpretations of individual works. Equally adept in describing how painterly problems are adapted to speculative fiction, or in foregrounding the role played by diverse heritages of Western philosophy and science, Ackland explores the layered depths, conceits and lightning interplays that inform individual scenes, and reveals the Australian writer's immense ambitions. This study demonstrates Bail's work to be as contemporary as postmodernism, yet timeless in its probing of the human condition, and of what individuals may achieve in a world subject to both global forces and mutability. This is an important book for all literature, cultural studies, and Australasian collections.