BOOK NEWS: Stein's responses to the politics of authorship

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

BY ISABELLE PARKINSON

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474484329

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-gertrude-stein-and-the-politics-of-participation.html

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation 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 democracy
• Explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation
• Explores 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 authorship

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This 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.

"Isabelle Parkinson provides keen-eyed reappraisals of Stein's political writing, and of the political claims made by others about Stein's writing. Gertude Stein and the Politics of Participation is a sober, multidimensional guide to some of the most vexing problems of modernism and mass democracy." – Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University

Isabelle Parkinson is a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on Gertrude Stein’s authorial identity and on the role of the anthology in constructing an avant-garde canon. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Cultures, and Bloomsbury’s Historicising Modernism series.