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Helen Groth Helen Groth i(A131403 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Transitional Voices in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney Helen Groth , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 1 2015;
'This paper will examine the ultimately incommensurable divide between the listening ear and speaking voice that defines Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934). Read in the context of an internationally conceived modernist interrogation of the conditions of literary production, exemplified by the modernist magazine transition, where Stead first encountered James Joyce’s ‘in-progress’ publication of Finnegan’s Wake, Stead’s experimentation with sound in her first novel registers an exilic sensibility which would become a generative impetus for her later work. Founded in 1927, transition reflected the fusion of Dadaism, Surrealism and German Romanticism of its American expatriate editor Eugene Jolas. Initially published as a monthly magazine it was cut back after twelve issues to four issues a year and repackaged as ‘An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment’. Issues continued to appear, sometimes sporadically, until 1938, with later incarnations bearing the suggestive subtitle ‘International Workshop for Orphic Creation’. The revolutionary project of wresting the voice and the word from the machinery of mass production and rational communication, as this later subtitle indicates, was sustained throughout the life of the magazine. Reading Seven Poor Men of Sydney alongside this collective dismantling of the grounds of rational communication throws the novel’s particular convergence of a modernist inspired exilic aesthetics with a typically excoriating critique of bourgeois radicalism into sharp relief.' (Publication abstract)
1 y separately published work icon Remaking Literary History Helen Groth (editor), Paul Sheehan (editor), Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Press , 2010 Z1809596 2010 anthology criticism 'Enquiries into the relationship between literature and history continue to stir up intense critical and scholarly debate. Alongside the new hybrid categories that have emerged out of this ferment―life-writing, ficto-criticism, "history from below", and so on―there has been a welter of new literary histories, new ways of tracking the connections between the written word and the historically bound world. This has resulted in renewed discussion about distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, about dialogues taking place between different national literatures, and about ascertaining the relative status of the literary text in relation to other cultural forms.

Remaking Literary History
seeks to clarify the diversity of issues and positions that have arisen from these debates. Central to the book's approach is a rigorous and constructive questioning of the past, across disciplinary boundaries. This is carried out through four detailed and engrossing sections that explore the relationship between memory and forgetting; what it means to be 'subject' to history; the upsurge of interest in trauma and redemption; and the question of historical reinvention, which demonstrates how the overwriting of history continues to reinvigorate the literary imagination.' (Publisher's blurb).
1 y separately published work icon Literature and Sensation Anthony Uhlmann (editor), Helen Groth (editor), Paul Sheehan (editor), Stephen McLaren (editor), Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Press , 2009 Z1673570 2009 anthology criticism
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