Christina Stead - An Internationalist and Cultural Mediator

Authors

  • Anne Holden Rønning

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1344/co20172252-64

Keywords:

Christina Stead, internationalism, transculturalism, cultural mediator

Abstract

Christina Stead was one of the great Australian writers of the twentieth century. After a revived interest in her work in the 70s and 80s, Hazel Rowley’s Biography (1993) and Chris William’s Christina Stead: A Life of Letters (1989), as well as an issue of Southerly in 2003, Stead is in danger of being once again forgotten. Many of her texts, however, are relevant today as they express attitudes dominant in social media. It is perhaps fitting now in the twenty-first century that we evaluate how relevant her work still is in an age of transculturalism and globalization.

We see in some of her texts the same dissatisfaction with politicians, politics and social life expressed in current political events such as Brexit and the Trump phenomenon. 

Author Biography

Anne Holden Rønning

Anne Holden Rønning is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research areas and fields of publication are Women’s Studies and postcolonial and transcultural literatures and ideas, especially from New Zealand and Australia. She has co-edited several volumes of essays in these fields notably Identities and Masks: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (2001), Readings for the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational (2007) and For Was I not Born here? Identity and Culture in the Work of Yvonne du Fresne (2010). She has also edited an issue of the online journal Otherness and some issues of the online journal Coolabah.  She was chair of the European Association for Studies of Australia 2001-2005. She has also published in and co-edited two books with Mary Louise Kearney of UNESCO: Women and the University Curriculum: Towards Equality, Democracy and Peace (1996) Graduate Prospects in a Changing Society (1998).

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Published

2017-04-26