Description
Book SynopsisBrings to life Gertrude Stein's surrealist sensibilities and personal values borne from her WWII anxieties, not least of which originated in a dread of anti-Semitism. Ery Shin argues that Stein's later works engage with storytelling and life-writing in startling ways - most emphatically and poignantly through the surrealist lens.
Trade ReviewGertrude Stein's Surrealist Years is a serious and original contribution to Stein studies. The breadth of historical and literary contexts is impressive as well as Shin's exquisite close readings of a wide range of Stein’s primary texts." - Sharon J. Kirsch, author of
Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric and coeditor of
Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein"In this original, provocative, and necessary study, Ery Shin brings new insight and perspective to a growing body of important scholarship, arguing for the implicitly progressive politics of Stein's sui generis aesthetics. Crucially, Shin's book also stands as a firm and powerful response to the spurious yet nevertheless persistent claims surrounding Stein's alleged fascist leanings, for in lucid and convincing prose she shows how Stein's artistic vision aligns with the dream state that her contemporaries among the Surrealists practiced and advocated as an antiauthoritarian consciousness. This book opens an entirely new conversation and will surely inspire new debate." - Amy Moorman Robbins, author of
American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and FormTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Contexts
- 2. Ruskin’s Ghost
- 3. On Style
- 4. The Drowned
- 5. The Pleasures of Solipsism
- 6. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
