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

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.