Vital Stein : Gertrude Stein, Modernism and Life

## Stein’s modernist fascination with life connects her writing to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers * Offers an alternative vitalist framework for our understanding of modernism and the avant-garde * Outlines a genealogy of the contemporary fascination with vitalism * Contains detailed readings of Stein’s texts from the early 1900s to the 1930s that make visible the vitalist system that underpins Stein’s project This book focuses on Gertrude Stein, who wanted to capture ‘this thing life’ in writing, and argues that Stein is linked to a number of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers, who, like Stein, also conceived of life as an open, differential system. These chapters weave together Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and A.N. Whitehead, offering readers an alternative vitalist framework.