AustLit logo

AustLit

y separately published work icon The Bystander single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1957... 1957 The Bystander
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

It is a study of innocence in a world of ruins and of the consequences when this innocent - the bystander of the title - is by force of circumstances drawn into the meotional lives of those about him. The setting is the farmlands of Western Australia ... and the story opens when the Farnhams engage a European refugee to keep house for their son Keithy, while they visit England. (Publisher's blurb, inside front cover).

Notes

  • Dedication: To Dieter Grant-Frost and other denizens of that stately pile, St George's College
  • Epigraph: Though the Fates have endued me with a pretty kind of lightness, that I can laugh at the world in a corner on't ... yet let the world know, there is some difference betwixt my jovial condition and the lunary state of madness; I am not quite out of my wits. Middleton: The Witch

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,      :       MacDonald ,       1957 .
      Extent: 238p.
Alternative title: Udenfor
Language: Danish
    • Copenhagen,
      c
      Denmark,
      c
      Scandinavia, Western Europe, Europe,      :       Wangel ,       1961 .
      Extent: 231p.
VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS ()

Works about this Work

Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;

'Critical interpretations of Randolph Stow's works have been inclined to see them as studies of alienation.  This essay addresses the material basis for the novels that Stow set in the Geraldton hinterland, namely A Haunted Land (1956), The Bystander (1957), and Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965).  Against the metaphysical and postcolonial readings of Stow's work, this essay posits an alienation that stems from a change in agricultural mode from pastoral to farming.'  (Publication abstract)
An Imperishable Spring? Stow’s Tourmaline, the Cold War and the Phenomenon of the Star Kerry Leves , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 255-264) 'Published in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Tourmaline points toward Cold War horizons. America, the guardian of the free world after World War II, was bolstered in its resistance to Communism by Christian revivalism, two of whose most gifted exponents, the Catholic priest Father Patrick Peyton and the Protestant evangelist Dr Billy Graham, made successful visits to Australia in the 1950s. In Stow's Tourmaline, the "esprit de corps" of a drought-stricken, impoverished former goldmining town in the Western Australian desert undergoes Christian revival thanks to a water diviner who calls himself Michael Random. Blond, blue-eyed, handsome and athletic, Michael is nonetheless in a state of religious crisis that is alleviated only when an old Aboriginal woman, Gloria Day, refers him to one of Jesus' parables. But Michael is already a star by virtue of the townspeople's reception of him: whether they love him or subject him to a hermeneutics of suspicion (one of the characters sarcastically calls him "the witch doctor"), Michael's every move fascinates the Tourmaliners. In the course of the novel, Michael's star is eclipsed, perhaps on the very terms of the parable cited by Gloria Day. Polarised around religious certainties and uncertainties, encompassing unrequited passions and Western-movie-style power struggles, Tourmaline could be described as an epistemological melodrama. Besides Tourmaline, the paper draws on Stow's The Bystander (1957) and Visitants (1979) for evidence of a complex, nuanced relationship between Stow's Australia, a mediated United States of America, and the 'star' phenomenon.' (Author's abstract)
y separately published work icon The Novels of Randolph Stow : A Critical Study Nidhi Bhagat , Jaipur : Pointer Publishers , 1993 Z149809 1993 single work criticism
From Metastasis to Metamorphosis : The House of Self in the Novels of Randolph Stow Marc Delrez , 1990 single work criticism
— Appears in: Kunapipi , vol. 12 no. 1 1990; (p. 32-47)
'... Vox et Praetera Nihil ...' : Randolph Stow Horst Priessnitz , 1986 single work criticism
— Appears in: Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction 1986; (p. 371-388)
Stand By for a Good Book D. J. M. , 1957 single work review
— Appears in: Pelican , 19 July 1957; (p. 4)
— Review of The Bystander Randolph Stow , 1957 single work novel
[Review] The Bystander 1957 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 26 July 1957; (p. 453)
— Review of The Bystander Randolph Stow , 1957 single work novel
[Review] The Bystander Kylie Tennant , 1957 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 10 August 1957; (p. 13)
— Review of The Bystander Randolph Stow , 1957 single work novel
[Review] The Bystander 1957 single work review
— Appears in: The West Australian , 6 July 1957; (p. 9)
— Review of The Bystander Randolph Stow , 1957 single work novel
[Review] The Bystander 1957 single work review
— Appears in: The Times , 13 June 1957; (p. 13)
— Review of The Bystander Randolph Stow , 1957 single work novel
An Imperishable Spring? Stow’s Tourmaline, the Cold War and the Phenomenon of the Star Kerry Leves , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 255-264) 'Published in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Tourmaline points toward Cold War horizons. America, the guardian of the free world after World War II, was bolstered in its resistance to Communism by Christian revivalism, two of whose most gifted exponents, the Catholic priest Father Patrick Peyton and the Protestant evangelist Dr Billy Graham, made successful visits to Australia in the 1950s. In Stow's Tourmaline, the "esprit de corps" of a drought-stricken, impoverished former goldmining town in the Western Australian desert undergoes Christian revival thanks to a water diviner who calls himself Michael Random. Blond, blue-eyed, handsome and athletic, Michael is nonetheless in a state of religious crisis that is alleviated only when an old Aboriginal woman, Gloria Day, refers him to one of Jesus' parables. But Michael is already a star by virtue of the townspeople's reception of him: whether they love him or subject him to a hermeneutics of suspicion (one of the characters sarcastically calls him "the witch doctor"), Michael's every move fascinates the Tourmaliners. In the course of the novel, Michael's star is eclipsed, perhaps on the very terms of the parable cited by Gloria Day. Polarised around religious certainties and uncertainties, encompassing unrequited passions and Western-movie-style power struggles, Tourmaline could be described as an epistemological melodrama. Besides Tourmaline, the paper draws on Stow's The Bystander (1957) and Visitants (1979) for evidence of a complex, nuanced relationship between Stow's Australia, a mediated United States of America, and the 'star' phenomenon.' (Author's abstract)
y separately published work icon The Novels of Randolph Stow : A Critical Study Nidhi Bhagat , Jaipur : Pointer Publishers , 1993 Z149809 1993 single work criticism
From Metastasis to Metamorphosis : The House of Self in the Novels of Randolph Stow Marc Delrez , 1990 single work criticism
— Appears in: Kunapipi , vol. 12 no. 1 1990; (p. 32-47)
Myth and Reality in Randolph Stow Alice Arnott Oppen , 1967 single work criticism biography
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 27 no. 2 1967; (p. 82-94)
The Novels of Randolph Stow P. H. Newby , 1957 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Letters , November vol. 1 no. 2 1957; (p. 49-51)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (21)
Last amended 14 Jul 2008 10:09:17
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X