AustLit

'The three articles that follow were commissioned in order to celebrate the fact that, fifty years after publication, The Man Who Loved Children still fascinates, still presents itself as "unread," and more than ever seems a puzzle that we must work at if we are to further our thinking on the nature of narrative in its relations to gender, politics, aesthetics, and reality. '

Source: Introduction.

'Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children poses a challenge to literary history as Jauss conceives it. The reception of the novel has a particularly rich history that spans fifty years and three distinct periods: 1940, when the novel was initially published; 1965, when it was reissued; and a period beginning in 1969 with the publication of the first book on Stead and continuing into the present. In all three periods, critics examine the novel with reference to "horizons of expectations" constituted by the "literary experience" they share (Jauss, "Literary History" 22; emphasis added). But critical discussions of The Man Who Loved Children in all three periods also involve evaluation  and specifically judgments about quality which, Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues (22), are legitimated by and in turn ratify the "evaluative authority" of particular critics and cultural institutions. These judgments and the evaluative communities whose authority they ratify are themselves inflected by material and ideological change. Whether we define the context of reception primarily in material and ideological terms, in aesthetic terms, or in terms of evaluative and interpretive communities (Fish) that mediate between the material and ideological, on the one hand, and the aesthetic, on the other, the "philological understanding" that Jauss regards as the goal of literary history lies just beyond a vanishing point determined by the particular horizons in (against) which the novel is examined. What emerges in place of the authoritative philological understanding that Jauss envisions are three distinct and distinctly relative versions of The Man Who Loved Children.'

Source: pp.472-473.