Primary Stein

Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein

Contributions by Adam Frank, E.L. McCallum, Gabrielle Dean, Jody Cardinal, Kristin Bergen, Linda Voris, Nancy Kuhl, Neil Schmitz, Phoebe Stein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Sarah Posman, Steven Gould Axelrod, Janet Boyd, Sharon J. Kirsch Edited by Janet Boyd, Sharon J. Kirsch

Publication date:

16 October 2014

Length of book:

320 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739183199

Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein’s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein’s writing. Following Stein’s own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein’s primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein’s texts.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Primer for Primary Stein
Sharon J. Kirsch and Janet Boyd
Chapter 1. Make It Plain: Stein and Toklas Publish the Plain Edition
Gabrielle Dean
Chapter 2. Woolfenstein, the Sequel
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Chapter 3. “Come too”: 1920s Erotic Rights Discourse and Gertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”
Jody Cardinal
Chapter 4. Long Dull Poems: Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation and Wordsworth’s The Prelude
Rebecca Ariel Porte
Chapter 5. tender buttons, notwithstanding
Neil Schmitz
Chapter 6. How to Read How to Write: Bothering with Gertrude Stein
Sharon J. Kirsch
Chapter 7. Framing Devices: Reading Background in the Sequence of Gertrude Stein’s Composition
Linda Voris
Chapter 8. Radio Free Stein: Rendering Queen and Country
Adam Frank
Chapter 9. “A Spare American Emotion”
E. L. McCallum
Chapter 10. “More light!—Electric Light.” Stein in Dialogue with the Romantic Paradigm in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
Sarah Posman
Chapter 11. Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of Literature
Janet Boyd
Chapter 12. Modernist and Future Ex-Modernist: Postwar Stein
Kristin Bergen
Chapter 13. History, Narrative, and “Daily Living” in Wars I Have Seen
Phoebe Stein
Chapter 14. Mrs. Reynolds: Stein’s Anti-Nazi Novel
Steven Gould Axelrod
Appendix A: A Note on the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers in the Twenty-First Century
Nancy Kuhl
Appendix B: “The Gertrude Stein Collection” reprinted from The Yale Gazette 22.2 (October 1947)
Donald Gallup
Index
Notes on contributors

These 14 essays contribute to growing scholarship about Stein as a modernist. Boyd and Kirsch aim to shift focus from Stein’s biography, celebrity, art collecting, and salon to her writing, especially her experimental pieces, and her method of composition. Some contributors examine little-known pieces, such as the play For the Country Entirely and the narratives 'Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story' and 'Why Are There Whites to Console'; others take a fresh look at better-known pieces, such as Wars I Have Seen and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. Neil Schmitz offers a witty take on Tender Buttons, reading the work in the context of Stein’s falling out with her brother Leo. Steven Gould Axelrod argues against claims that Stein was a Nazi sympathizer by reading her novel Mrs. Reynolds as 'a hate letter to Hitler.' Curator Gabrielle Dean traces the history of Plain Editions, the publishing venture that enabled Stein to publish her early works. Several writers consider themes of time, space, and movement. Two appendixes illuminate Yale’s Stein archive. A wide-ranging collection that includes works not usually given scholarly attention. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.