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Cosmopolitan and politically oriented Australian writer Christina Stead produced fourteen major works of fiction, mostly written when she was an expatriate in Britain, Europe, and the United States, between 1930 and 1960. Stead's fiction promiscuously traverses these times and places--deploying genres as diverse as the epic, romance, künstlerroman (novel dealing with the development of an artist), picaresque, and social and political satire--ultimately in quest of an imaginative project that has been likened in its ambition to Honoré de Balzac's Human Comedy (1827-1847). Stead's experimental approach to the novel and to the treatment of character is not only influenced by key nineteenth- and twentieth-century practitioners--including in addition to Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--but is also shaped by her encounters with modernist culture and writing, radical political thought, and the theories of Charles Darwin and other scientific naturalists. Stead's fiction, while self-consciously engaging with this European and transatlantic cultural heritage, is also conditioned by the somewhat marginal, postcolonial position of an expatriate Australian white woman of her generation.
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