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y separately published work icon Seven Poor Men of Sydney single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 1934... 1934 Seven Poor Men of Sydney
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a brilliant portrayal of a group of men and women living in Sydney in the 1920s amid conditions of poverty and social turmoil.

Set against the vividly drawn backgrounds of Fisherman's (Watson's) Bay and the innercity slums, the various characters seek to resolve their individual spiritual dilemmas; through politics, religion and philosophy.

Their struggles, their pain and their frustrations are portrayed with consummate skill in this memorable evocation of a city and an era.' (Publication summary)

Exhibitions

18005830
18005672

Contents

* Contents derived from the Carlton, Parkville - Carlton area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,:Melbourne University Publishing , 2015 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Delia Falconer , single work criticism

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Peter Davies ,
      1934 .
      image of person or book cover 517317279967678538.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 358p.
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Appleton ,
      1935 .
      image of person or book cover 631887301605125184.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: vi, 369 p.p.
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Angus and Robertson , 1965 .
      image of person or book cover 2166681490593695995.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: xv, 319p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Introduction by R. G. Geering.
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Pacific Books , 1971 .
      Extent: xv, 319p.
      ISBN: 0207121370
      Series: Pacific Books Angus and Robertson (publisher), 1961 series - publisher The establishment of this paperback imprint of Angus Robertson was spearheaded by Beatrice Davis. It started with print runs of 20,000 in 1961 (Paper Empires: History of Book in Australia, 18).This paperback series, published by Angus and Robertson, contains both numbered and unnumbered volumes.
    • North Ryde, Ryde - Gladesville - Hunters Hill area, Northwest Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales,: Imprint , 1990 .
      image of person or book cover 7484524204962175307.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 319p.
      Note/s:
      • Introduction by Margaret Harris.
      ISBN: 0207170231 (pbk.)
      Series: Imprint Classics Angus and Robertson (publisher), series - publisher
    • Bondi Junction, Bondi area, Sydney Eastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: ETT Imprint , 1999 .
      Extent: 319p.
      Note/s:
      • Introduction by Margaret Harris.
      ISBN: 1875892605
Language: Italian
    • Milan,
      c
      Italy,
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Garzanti ,
      1988 .
      image of person or book cover 3525432390325884584.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Alternative title: Sette Poveracci di Sydney
      Extent: 342p.
      ISBN: 8811663229

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording; large print.

Works about this Work

Dazzling Book by a Sydney Girl Montague Grover , single work review
— Review of Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel
Do Australian Modernisms Strike Back? Still Harping on ‘Margins’ Marilena Parlati , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: Rethinking Peripheral Modernisms 2024; (p. 99-118)

'New modernist studies problematise the term ‘modernism’, its uses and abuses, therefore views on non-hierarchical modernist constellations exemplify the “simultaneous uncontemporaneities” Patrick Williams expanded upon in 2000. The purported ‘belatedness’ of ‘other’ modernisms is predicated on such premises, with Oceania, and more specifically Australia, as a fertile case in question. By looking askance at peripheral modernisms, and thus trying to read against the grain of a stale and debatable centre/margin cultural divide, this paper investigates many received assumptions by focussing on two women writers who have both been marginally included under the ‘modernist umbrella’: Christina Stead, an Australian expatriate to both Britain and the US, and Eleanor Dark, who chose to remain unabashedly local. In particular, I investigate Waterway (1938) and Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), novels in which Dark and Stead portray the metropolitan fluidities of the capital city of a settler-state described by John Williams as a “quarantined culture”.' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism Meg Brayshaw , New York (City) : Palgrave Macmillan , 2021 21207298 2021 multi chapter work criticism

'This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Modernity in the Antipodes : Politics and Aesthetics in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney Naish Gawen , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 34 no. 2 2020; (p. 180-199)
'Having grown up in Sydney in the first decades of the twentieth century, Christina Stead left Australia in 1928 at the age of twenty-six and returned only forty years later. Critical responses to Stead’s work tended to repress her Australianness, even when those critical responses came from Australians themselves; in 1948, Nettie Palmer commented on walking past an “impressive shopfront showing American and English classics and moderns in good editions: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Quixote (English), Christina Stead, Thackeray” (Palmer 149). Stead’s first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is the least ambiguously Australian of all her works, centered on a group of workers at a printing press in Sydney in the 1920s. This novel is important in the history of Australian literary fiction, arriving early in the development of an ossified split between modernist and realist modes—a split that was to become a defining schism of Australian literature in the subsequent decades. The social, political, and cultural tensions that fed the perceived split between modernist and realist writing in Australia—tensions that revolved around the role of organized left-wing politics in social life and the relationship of Australia to modernity and empire—receive a deep and extended treatment in Stead’s novel. These tensions play out at a formal level in the coexistence of both realist and modernist strategies of representation in Stead’s novel, strategies deeply influenced by Stead’s reading of both nineteenth-century French realist fiction and the modernist avant-garde. The challenge when reading Seven Poor Men of Sydney is to be sensitive to both the European literary and intellectual tradition that undoubtedly nourished her work and the Australian context out of which it was born.'
In Triumph Over the Spirit Lost : Revisiting Seven Poor Men of Sydney Liam Diviney , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , June 2020;
A Reader's Notebook Nettie Palmer , 1935 single work review
— Appears in: All About Books , 11 February vol. 7 no. 2 1935; (p. 21-23)

— Review of Hard Light Frederick T. Macartney , 1932 single work poetry ; Melbourne Odes Furnley Maurice , 1934 selected work poetry prose ; Love Redeemed William Baylebridge , 1934 selected work poetry ; Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel ; An Eden of the Good Grant Madison Hervey , 1934 single work novel
Australian Literature Society [Meeting Report] F. G. G. Hynes , 1935 single work review column
— Appears in: All About Books , 12 July vol. 7 no. 7 1935; (p. 119)

— Review of Saraband for Dead Lovers Helen Simpson , 1935 single work novel ; Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel ; Forty-Six : 46 W. S. Howard , 1934 single work novel ; Lest We Lose Our Edens Jean Campbell , 1935 single work novel
[Review] Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) 1935 single work review
— Appears in: The North Queensland Register , 26 January 1935; (p. 25)

— Review of Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel
Young Xavier is No Idealist Laurie Clancy , 1991 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 26-27 January 1991; (p. rev 6)

— Review of South of Capricornia : Short Stories 1925-1934 Xavier Herbert , 1990 selected work short story ; Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel ; Capricornia : A Novel Xavier Herbert , 1938 single work novel
Paperbacks Simon Hughes , 1991 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Herald (Sunday Review) , 27 January 1991; (p. 17)

— Review of Blessed City : The Letters of Gwen Harwood to Thomas Riddell, January to September 1943 Gwen Harwood , 1990 selected work correspondence ; Painted Woman Sue Woolfe , 1989 single work novel ; Seven Poor Men of Sydney Christina Stead , 1934 single work novel
A Note on Christina Stead and China Jianjun Li , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 2 no. 2003; (p. 93-97)
Discusses the representations of China and Chinese people in Christina Stead's work.
Christina Stead in Japanese Margaret Harris , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 2 no. 2003; (p. 99-103)
Examines some Stead correspondence relating to a proposed translation of Seven Poor Men of Sydney into Japanese that did not eventuate 'due to the financial difficulties and eventual collapse of the intended publisher' (p.99).
'Those Boys Told Me Everything' : The Politics of the Secretary of Christina Stead's 1930s Fiction Brigid Rooney , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 17 no. 1 2003; (p. 29-35)

Rooney examines how 'Stead's fiction intricately negotiates her encounters with these [the banking and Popular Front politics worlds] divergent "phallocracies" through the multivalent and liminal figure of the secretary.' Rooney notes that while 'Stead's narrative use of the male political secretary safeguards her identity as a socially accepatable women' it also provides 'a context for discerning the nature of her contribution to 1930s debates about capitalism, communism and revolution.'

Best Sellers and A.B.A. Recommendations 1935 single work column
— Appears in: All About Books , 11 February vol. 7 no. 2 1935; (p. 26-27)
Christina Stead's "Seven Poor Men of Sydney" Michael Wilding , 1993 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Radical Tradition : Lawson, Furphy, Stead 1993; (p. 59-82) Studies in Classic Australian Fiction 1997; (p. 160-186)
'When Christina Stead's Seven Poor Men of Sydney appeared in 1934 the dominant themes of Australian writing were rural, the characteristic settings were the country, the bush and the outback. There had, of course, been poems and fiction written about the cities; it isn't the case that there were no urban materials. Henry Lawson had written powerfully about urban poverty in the series of stories set in 'Jones' Alley' in the 1890s and had begun his career with the powerful urban ballads 'Faces in the Street' and 'The Army of the Rear'. William Lane's The Workingman s Paradise (1892) had described urban conditions in Sydney in the 1890s. But the received impression is of a literature devoted to perpetuating the outback myth of Australia, even though the population was predominantly urban.216 Seven Poor Men of Sydney can be seen as a work confronting and challenging this outback myth.' (Introduction)
Last amended 14 Nov 2017 15:04:51
Subjects:
  • Urban,
  • Sydney, New South Wales,
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