Description
Book SynopsisHannah Roche reinterprets three major modern lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes.
The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.
Trade ReviewThis theoretically sophisticated reading of three lesbian writers—Stein, Hall, and Barnes—is at once playful and serious. Roche’s insistence on the queerness of desire, romance, and love between women takes feminist modernist studies in an exciting new direction. -- Laura Doan, author of
Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern WarIn its lively endorsement of lesbian modernism,
The Outside Thing extols the possibilities and pleasures three canonical writers find as they playfully occupy, exploit, and expand conventions of romance and marriage in their intimate lives and iconic writing. Affectionately championing Stein, Hall, and Barnes as liberating the romance plot from its heteronormative constraints, Hannah Roche also aims to rescue these writers from timeworn scholarly assumptions that have held them hostage. -- Jodie Medd, author of
Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of ModernismHannah Roche’s
The Outside Thing is a valuable contribution to current debates about modernism, sexuality, and women’s writing. Roche’s provocation—that the term lesbian is a critically and theoretically necessary one—is borne out convincingly in her lively and thorough readings of romance in the lives, writing, and writing-lives of Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. This is a book that subsequent scholars will learn from. -- Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University
Employing extensive archival research and a groundbreaking theoretical approach, Roche cogently argues that modernists such as Stein, Radclyffe, and Barnes crafted heterosexual narratives (romances) that develop lesbian themes. Highly recommended. * Choice *
Hannah Roche’s study of three major lesbian writers of the Modernist period—Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes—presents a finely framed discussion of how these writers both embodied the innovations of modernist literary practice while integrating the narrative frames of Victorian romance novels into their texts. . . Roche’s book offers a compelling examination of these writers and is well worth study. * Review of English Studies *
It seems an apt time to be considering the ways the pre-sexological narrative forms of depicting intimacy between women filter into the modern moment. Roche provides us with a resource for doing just that. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Locating the Lesbian Writer, or “We Inside Us Do Not Change”
Part I: Gertrude Stein1. “The Outside Thing” and
Things As They Are: Gertrude Stein’s Lesbian Romance
2. “No There There”: Inside the Marriage Plot
Part II: Radclyffe Hall3. Strange Soil and Novel Ground: Radclyffe Hall’s Romance Plots
4. Romantic Emblems and “The Real Thing”: Writing the Souline Affair
Part III: Djuna Barnes5. From Lesbian Reading to Bisexual Writing: Switching Tracks with Djuna Barnes
6. The Trapeze Effect: Djuna Barnes’s Bisexual Romance
Coda: A Happy Ending?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
