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

Isabelle Parkinson's terrific new study considers Gertrude Stein, her writing, and her cultural context within both Anglo-American literary culture and US political culture.She reads Stein herself as a figure who bridged both "mass and coterie publication" (2) and whose writing shaped and was shaped by the political culture around her. Chapters consider Stein's publications before the mid-1930s, including Stein's often-discussed pieces (including Three Lives [1909], her portraits of figures like Picasso and Matisse, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [1933]) and less frequently discussed texts like Geography and Plays (1922) and Useful Knowledge (1928).She links insightful readings of those texts with equally insightful readings of the period's political and intellectual culture.Parkinson's focus is on the ways that Stein's fluctuating status as an author-was she a genius or a fraud?was she an insider or an interloper?-indexes broader conversations about democracy in the early twentieth century.Engagement with "Stein's work, her authorial identity and the literary culture that wrangled over her authorship," according to Parkinson, affords us the opportunity to "work through the politics-and the ethicsof literary participation, of writing and rights, and of what it means to write as a citizen of early-twentieth-century democracy" (29).Even as she published pieces in little magazines, Stein doggedly sought publication in mainstream venues like Vanity Fair, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post, believing her work to be meant for a wide audience.Scholars including Leonard Diepeveen (in Mock Modernism (2014) and in his Broadview edition of Tender Buttons [2017]) and Karen Leick (in Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity [2009]), among others, have painstakingly documented the kinds of conversations, both denigrating and admiring, about Stein's work (and modernism more generally) that appeared in these same publications.At the same time, the authors and critics more squarely associated with modernism as a movement-Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding-were also responding to Stein's work as they attempted to shape the emerging literary culture, pointing to her writing as exemplifying modernism's potential or the forces that imperiled the nascent movement.Alongside the changes to the literary landscape were enormous geopolitical changes, particularly in the aftermath of the First World War.On the one hand, as Parkinson explains, "[i]nternationalism was understood in large swathes of opinion in the popular weeklies as a threat to American democracy" (21), and Stein's own nationalist ideologies rhyme with that popular logic.