Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation

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.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and Democracy1. The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives2. Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits and Tender Buttons3. Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s Contested Authorship4. Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass DemocracyCoda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The Autobiography of Alice B ToklasBibliographyIndex

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.