Medley and Hotchpotch. "Christina Stead: Satirist", by Anne Pender. [review]

Abstract

Pender’s is the first study to focus on Stead the satirist (though the claim that ‘critics have chosen to ignore the satire in her fiction’ overstates the case considerably). She locates Stead within a tradition that begins with Horace and Juvenal, and is still current in the postmodernists Pynchon and Rushdie. Pender reads her as part of a general emergence of parodic satire between the wars, in company with Huxley, Waugh and Orwell, and, during the cold war, with Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.