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

This book offers a new way of reading Stein's key publications by interpreting them as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation. It challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein's writing as democratic by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracy. It explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation. It also examines how 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 31 January 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Offers a fresh perspective on Stein's key publications, viewing them as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation

Tackles the issue of Stein's politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that interprets Stein's writing as democratic by placing her texts firmly within the context of twentieth-century democracy

Explores the intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject, as well as 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

This book delves into 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 from 1909 to 1933. The ongoing debates across a wide range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein's right to participate in modernist authorship offer an insightful example of how literary culture reflected contemporary political discussions. This study explores how representations of Stein that portrayed her as either 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.

Weight: 436g
Dimension: 223 x 144 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474484329