Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein - Softcover

Younkins, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1498500889 ISBN 13: 9781498500883

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2016

Synopsis

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amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished.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.

About this title

About the Author:

Janet Boyd is assistant professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Sharon J. Kirsch is an assistant professor of English and rhetorical studies at Arizona State University.

Review:

Primary Stein will become a primary source for our reading of Gertrude Stein, among the greatest of modern writers, among the most incessantly challenging. I am grateful for this smart, original book. (Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University)

It is great to have an anthology that returns to the writing of Gertrude Stein, since her interesting life and times have often diverted attention from actually reading her work. Stein’s work is unlike any other writing—funny, challenging, almost physical in its rhythms, rhymes, and patterns of repetition, and it covers many genres and modes of writing. Sharon J. Kirsch and Janet Boyd’s volume Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein is an inspiration to anyone who wants to read Gertrude Stein’s work, whether that one is a practiced reader or just beginning to read Stein. And anyone who teaches Stein’s writing will find the essays on a selection of works as well as on publication history and the poetics of Stein very useful. (Tania Ørum, University of Copenhagen)

This is a terrific collection—lucid, wide ranging, and rich. Boyd and Kirsch have assembled a wonderful group of essays on a variety of Stein texts, representing a range of approaches to Stein’s work. This collection is an exciting contribution to Stein scholarship and will also appeal to scholars in feminist and gender studies, modernist studies, and other areas. (Deborah Mix, Ball State University)

Primary Stein heralds a return to where the impetus of literary critical should lay: with the writing itself, rather than with a character assassination of a nearly 70 year-old Jewish lesbian who was just trying to save her life (as well as the life of her also Jewish lesbian partner, Alice B. Toklas) during World War II. With this collection of essays, Boyd and Kirsch remind us about the scope and sophistication — as well as the playfulness and sensuality — of Stein’s writing. (Lambda Literary)

Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch’s Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein fulfils its titular ambitions of sparking a revaluation and rethinking of Stein’s accomplishments through greater reference to her texts in published and archival forms while lessening the privileged position often accorded to her personality and coterie.... The attention here to the Stein archives, primarily at Yale but also important collections at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the Donald Gallup Collection at the Southern Methodist University, is rich.... The individual contributions should have a significant impact on studies of Stein. (Year's Work in English Studies)

Following Gertrude Stein’s efforts throughout her life to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, the essays in Primary Stein return the lens to her primary texts, including novels, plays, lectures, poetry, and more. Much textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. Contributors to this collection draw on interdisciplinary backdrops to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein’s writing.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1498500889
• ISBN 13: 9781498500883
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320