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Democracy, Rights and n
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Half Title
Gertrude Stein and the
Politics of Participation
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Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century
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Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From
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Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction
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The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos
Geneva M. Gano
Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition
Guy J. Reynolds
Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Human Rights and
Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933
Isabelle Parkinson
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Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism
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Title Page
Gertrude Stein and the
Politics of Participation
Democracy, Rights and
Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933
ISABELLE PARKINSON
Copyright
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© Isabelle Parkinson 2023
Cover image: Portrait of Gertrude Stein, with American flag as backdrop, January 4,
1935. Photographed by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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Contents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and Democracy 1
1. The Politics of Authorship in Three Lives 36
2. Authorship and Community in Stein’s Pre-war Portraits
and Tender Buttons 84
3. Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s
Contested Authorship 140
4. Useful Knowledge and the Mind of Mass Democracy 189
Coda: Stein’s Democratic Authorship in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 227
Bibliography 238
Index 250
Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first and most profound thanks are to Suzanne Hobson, whose
generous support and guidance in the years during and after my PhD
at Queen Mary, University of London have extended far beyond any
possible obligation. I am also grateful to my adviser Morag Shiach
for calling me to account until I learned to account for myself.
Thanks are also due to Alex Goody and Robert Hampson, who
examined my PhD thesis, a process that helped me determine the
direction of this new project. The majority of this book was written
whilst I was teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature
and Culture at Queen Mary, and I have an enormous debt of grat-
itude to Kiera Vaclavik and Angus Nicholls for their mentorship
and encouragement, and for the extraordinary opportunities they
gave me to develop as an academic and teacher. Thanks also to
all those modernist scholars I always look forward to meeting at
conferences and whose lovely work and thrilling conversation has
stimulated and developed my thinking, including Hannah Roche,
Faye Hammill, Iain Bailey, Alix Beeston, Clara Jones, Sophie Oliver,
Natasha Periyan and Jeff Wallace.
Particular thanks are due to Janet Lyon, inspirational modernist
scholar and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, whose
forthright feedback proved to be a formative intervention at an
important moment in the development of this study. I am very
grateful for EUP’s initial readers for continuing this work, and for
the ongoing support of Modern American Literature and the New
Twentieth Century series editors, Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan.
Acknowledgements / vii
Thanks also to Susannah Butler from EUP for her patient and gentle
reminders.
I would like to acknowledge with deepest gratitude the bookish
friends Claudia Jessop, Andrew Gray, Kate Bomford, Nick Dodd,
Anneke Pettican, John Dunn and Emma Simpson who have lis-
tened and engaged with kindly attention to the long story of this
text, and especially Asiya Bulatova, modernist, traveller and dearest
padrooga. Finally, thanks to my best and most present reader, Marc
Lancaster, for his thereness, and to Evie and Vic Lancaster for being
Them.
Portions of Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation have
been published elsewhere. A version of Chapter 4 appeared as
‘Democrat or “imbecile”? Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge and
Discourses of Intellectual Disability in the To-day and To-morrow
Pamphlet Series’ in Journal of Modern Literature, 43:3 (2020), and
sections from Chapter 4 and from the Introduction appear in Useful
Knowledge beyond the Beinecke: Gertrude Stein reading discourses
of democracy and rights in Life magazine and the Literary Digest’
in Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to ‘Archivalism’, edited by
Matthew Feldman (Bloomsbury Academic: 2021). Thanks to JML
and Bloomsbury for permission to republish.
