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y separately published work icon The Rightangled Creek : A Sort of Ghost Story single work   novella  
Issue Details: First known date: 1968... 1968 The Rightangled Creek : A Sort of Ghost Story
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Puzzleheaded Girl : Four Novellas Christina Stead , New York (City) Canada : Holt, Rinehart and Winston , 1967 Z462478 1967 selected work novella

    'In The Puzzleheaded Girl, made up of four thematically linked novellas, Stead’s unsurpassable skills of observation and social critique are on full display. ...' (Source: Tet Publishing website)

         London : Secker and Warburg , 1968     pg. 113-180
Alternative title: Pokys Haus. Eine Art Geistergeschichte
Language: German
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Works about this Work

Nature and the Uncanny in Christina Stead's The Rightangled Creek William Lane , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 38 no. 1 & 2 2012; (p. 52-71)
Un imprinting dell'immaginazione : Christina Stead e la scrittura paterna Alessandra Contenti , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Trame parentali, trame letterarie 2000; (p. 139-149)
Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" : The Political Context Michael Wilding , 1989 single work criticism
— Appears in: Words and Wordsmiths : A Volume for H.L. Rogers 1989; (p. 147-173) Studies in Classic Australian Fiction 1997; (p. 187-220) 'The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender,232 to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America),233 and to her left-wing politics.234 Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl (1968). The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied in the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized compulsive, seemingly unwilled and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on or descant to material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those Ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fullness free from any ponderousness: and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.'  (Introduction)
'A Kingdom and a Place of Exile' : Women Writers and the World of Nature Dorothy Jones , 1984 single work criticism
— Appears in: World Literature Written in English , Autumn vol. 24 no. 2 1984; (p. 257-273) A Kingdom and a Place of Exile : Critical Essays on Postcolonial Women's Writing 2010; (p. 10-23)
Christina Stead's "The Puzzleheaded Girl" : The Political Context Michael Wilding , 1989 single work criticism
— Appears in: Words and Wordsmiths : A Volume for H.L. Rogers 1989; (p. 147-173) Studies in Classic Australian Fiction 1997; (p. 187-220) 'The fiction of Christina Stead (1902-83) is at last receiving something of its proper recognition after years of critical neglect, ascribed variously to her gender,232 to her expatriate status (born in Australia and spending her creative life in Europe and America),233 and to her left-wing politics.234 Her work is now being brought back into view within the general reappraisal of women writers and the extending of the canon of Australian literature. This essay explores her political vision with an examination of her volume of four novellas, The Puzzleheaded Girl (1968). The collection of novellas, even more than the volume of stories, is most publishers' least favourite form. It has proved similarly unattractive to critical commentary. Yet so many fiction writers have felt most at their ease in the novella, enjoying the space for amplification denied in the short story and free from the necessity of the ramifications of complex plotting and narrative expected in the novel. The novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl work not by conventional plot but by the great monologues her characters deliver and the obliquely realized compulsive, seemingly unwilled and unmotivated entanglements in which they live. Stead catches most remarkably the way people talk, and the way, talking, they reveal themselves, their sexual and political involvements and obsessions - though the characters themselves could never recognize them as obsessions. The world of intellectual, radical, fringe bohemian groups during the late 1940s and the McCarthyite period and its aftermath is effortlessly documented. None of the actions has that neat Jamesian form, but instead a succession of seemingly inconsequential events. It seems sometimes as if Christina Stead is writing a variation on or descant to material a more mundane writer would have treated naturalistically; though we could never reconstruct those Ur-novellas. It is a manner that leads to a remarkable concision, an elliptical compression, resulting in a solidity and fullness free from any ponderousness: and from the elisions and ellipses retaining a powerful energy that imprints these stories on the memory.'  (Introduction)
'A Kingdom and a Place of Exile' : Women Writers and the World of Nature Dorothy Jones , 1984 single work criticism
— Appears in: World Literature Written in English , Autumn vol. 24 no. 2 1984; (p. 257-273) A Kingdom and a Place of Exile : Critical Essays on Postcolonial Women's Writing 2010; (p. 10-23)
Nature and the Uncanny in Christina Stead's The Rightangled Creek William Lane , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 38 no. 1 & 2 2012; (p. 52-71)
Un imprinting dell'immaginazione : Christina Stead e la scrittura paterna Alessandra Contenti , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Trame parentali, trame letterarie 2000; (p. 139-149)
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Last amended 25 May 2017 13:56:43
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