Gertrude Stein and the politics of participation : democracy, rights and modernist authorship, 1909-1933

This book explores the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception. It examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein’s right to participate in modernist authorship provide an instructive example of the way literary culture reflected contemporary political discussion. This study explores how representations of Stein that figured her either as barely human or as the ultimate democratic subject reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and Democracy 1. The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives 2. Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits and Tender Buttons 3. Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s Contested Authorship 4. Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass Democracy Coda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Bibliography Index Offers a new way of reading Stein's key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation