Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation : : Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship 1909-1933 / / Isabelle Parkinson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• VerfasserIn: Parkinson, Isabelle,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century : MALN20C
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.) :; 1 B/W line art 1 black and white figure

Offers a new way of reading Stein’s key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation Tackles the problem of Stein’s politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein’s writing as ‘democratic’ by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracyExplores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participationExplores the way discourses of biological sciences and pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, as well as those of politics, law and education are mediated in literary conceptions of authorshipThis 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- Introduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism and Democracy -- CHAPTER 1 The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives -- CHAPTER 2 Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits and Tender Buttons -- CHAPTER 3 Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s Contested Authorship -- CHAPTER 4 Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass Democracy -- Coda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX