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In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein's posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein's poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklass work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein's original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem's several versions. This record of Stein's multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author's radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein's relationship with Toklas. The editors preface and poet Joan Retallacks introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein's poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate. Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Steins oeuvre.

In Henry James and Queer Modernity, first published in 2003, Eric Haralson examines far-reaching changes in gender politics and the emergence of modern male homosexuality as depicted in the writings of Henry James and three authors who were greatly influenced by him: Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Haralson places emphasis on American masculinity as portrayed in fiction between 1875 and 1935, but the book also treats events in England, such as the Oscar Wilde trials, that had a major effect on American literature. He traces James's engagement with sexual politics from his first novels of the 1870s to his 'major phase' at the turn of the century. The second section of this study measures James's extraordinary impact on Cather's representation of 'queer' characters, Stein's theories of writing and authorship as a mode of resistance to modern sexual regulation, and Hemingway's very self-constitution as a manly American author.

In this original and intriguing study, Anna Linzie examines three mid-twentieth-century texts never before treated as interrelated in a book-length work of literary criticism: Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Alice B. Toklas's The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and What Is Remembered (1963). Taking these three texts as intertexts or as an assemblage of the true story of Alice B. Toklas, Linzie challenges assumptions about primary authorship and singular identity that have continued to limit lesbian and feminist rereadings of autobiography as a genre and of Stein and Toklas as writers and historical figures.The True Story of Alice B. Toklas explores how the concept of autobiography as a primarily referential genre is challenged and transformed in relation to autobiographical texts written about the same person, the same life, but differently, by different writers, at different points in time. The concept of one true story is deconstructed in the process as Linzie modifies Homi K. Bhabha's “almost the same but not quite/not white\" for the purposes of this particular study as “almost the same but not quite/not straight.\" The investigation moves simultaneously on the planes of textuality and sexuality in order to provisionally articulate a “lesbian autobiographical subject\" in Linzie's reading of these three texts.Linzie's study fills a gap in literary criticism where Stein's companion and her work have been more or less neglected, conceptualizing the Stein-Toklas sexual/textual relationship as fundamentally reciprocal. The True Story of Alice B. Toklas provides a new critical perspective on Toklas as indispensable to Stein's literary production, a cultural laborer in her own right, and a writer of her own books. Making a significant contribution to recent lesbian/feminist reconceptualizations of the genre of autobiography, this study will fascinate Stein and Toklas scholars as well as those interested in queer and autobiography studies.

Gertrude Stein wanted Ida to be known in two ways: as a novel about a woman in the age of celebrity culture and as a text with its own story to tell. With the publication of this workshop edition of Ida, we have the novel exactly as it was published in 1941, and we also have the full record of its creation. Logan Esdale offers informative critical commentary and judiciously selected archival materials to illuminate Stein's experience of authorship from the novel's beginning in early summer 1937, through the various drafts and negotiations with her publisher, to the reviews that greeted the book's publication. Stein's careful and systematic preservation of all Ida-related materials for her archive at the Yale University Library was a conscious decision, and an invitation for us to study the complexity of her creative process.

\"Characters\" are those fictive beings in novels whose coherent patterns of behavior make them credible as people. \"Character\" is also used to refer to the capacity—or incapacity—of individuals to sustain core principles. When characters are inconsistent, they risk coming across as dangerous or immoral, not to mention unconvincing. But what is behind our culture's esteem for unwavering consistency? Out of Character examines literary characters who defy our culture's models of personal integrity. It argues that modernist writers Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot drew inspiration from vitalism as a way of reinventing the means of depicting people in fiction and poetry. Rather than regarding a rigid character as something that inoculates us against the shifting tides of circumstance, these writers insist on the ethical necessity of forming improvisational, dynamic social relationships. Charting the literary impact of William James, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in particular, Henri Bergson, this book contends that vitalist understandings of psychology, affect, and perception led to new situational and relational definitions of selfhood. As Moses demonstrates, the modernists stirred by these vital life lessons give us a sense of what psychic life looks like at its most intricate, complex, and unpredictable.

Gertrude Stein is recognized as an iconic and canonical literary modernist. In Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric , Sharon J. Kirsch broadens our understanding of Stein’s influence to include her impact on the field of rhetoric.   For humanities scholars as well as popular audiences, the relationship between rhetoric and literature remains vexed, in part due to rhetoric’s contemporary affiliation with composition, which makes it separate from, if not subordinate to, the study of literature. Gertrude Stein recognized no such separation, and this disciplinary policing of the study of English has diminished our understanding of her work, Kirsch argues. Stein’s career unfolded at the crossroads of literary composition and rhetorical theory, a site where she alternately challenged, satirized, and reinvented the five classical canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—even as she invented new trajectories of literary experimentation.   Kirsch follows Stein from her days studying composition and philosophy at Harvard through her expatriate years in France, fame in the 1930s, and experience of the Second World War. She frames Stein’s explorations of language as an inventive poetics that reconceived practices and theories of rhetorical invention during a period that saw the rise of literary studies and the decline of rhetorical studies. Through careful readings of canonical and lesser-known works, Kirsch offers a convincing critical portrait of Stein as a Sophistic provocateur who reinvented the canons by making a productive mess of canonical rhetoric and modernist categories of thought.   Readers will find much of interest in Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric. Kirsch offers myriad insights to scholars of Stein, to those interested in the interdisciplinary intersections of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, as well as to scholars and students in the field of rhetoric and communication studies. Positioning Stein as a major twentieth-century rhetorical theorist is particularly timely given increasing interest in historical and theoretical resonances between rhetoric and poetics and given the continued lack of recognition for women theorists in rhetorical studies.

Examines how surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein's writing through its poetics of oppositions   Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years brings to life Stein's surrealist sensibilities and personal values borne from her WWII anxieties, not least of which originated in a dread of anti-Semitism.

Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein’s poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein’s work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.

This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work. Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional notions of selfhood. As more conventional ways of thinking about consciousness became untenable, so too did conventional models of artistic expression.This book shows how Stein and Stevens provide powerful examples of this modern attempt to stage the new subject.