Gertrude Stein's 'The Making of Americans' is a groundbreaking family saga that delves into the complexities of American life, identity, and relationships. Written in Stein's signature stream-of-consciousness style, the novel pushes the boundaries of traditional narrative structure, challenging readers to look beyond the surface and explore the interconnectedness of individual experiences. Set against the backdrop of early 20th century America, the book offers a profound exploration of the American psyche and the immigrant experience, making it a timeless piece of literature. Stein's innovative use of language and narrative technique elevates 'The Making of Americans' to a work of art that continues to inspire and provoke readers to this day.

Arguing that Gertrude Stein's monumental novel The Making of Americans models a radically aesthetic relation to the world, E. L. McCallum demonstrates how the novel teaches us to read differently, unmaking our habits of reading. Each of the chapters works through close readings of Stein's text and a philosophical interlocutor to track a series of theoretical questions: what forms queer time, what are the limits of story, how do we feel emotion, how can we agree on a shared reality if interpretation and imagination intervene, and how do particular media shape how we convey this rich experience? The formally innovative agenda and epistemological drive of Stein's novel stages rich thought experiments that bear on questions that are central to some of the most vibrant conversations in literary studies today. In the midst of ongoing debates about the practices of reading, the difficulty of reading, and even the impossibility of reading, the moment has come to have a fuller critical engagement with this landmark novel. This book shows how.

The institutional history of Ginling College is arguably a family history. Ginling, a Christian, women's college in Nanjing founded by Western missionaries, saw itself as a family. The school's leaders built on the Confucian ideal to envision a feminized, Christian family—one that would spread Christianity and uplift the family that was the Chinese nation. Exploring the various incarnations of the trope of the "Ginling family," Jin Feng takes a microscopic view by emphasizing personal, subjective perspectives from the written and oral records of the Chinese and American women who created and sustained the school. Even when using more seemingly ordinary official documents, Feng seeks to shed light on the motives and dynamic interactions that created them and the impact they had on individual lives. Using this perspective, Feng questions the standard characterization of missionary higher education as simply Western cultural imperialism to show a process of influence and cultural exchange.

“You are, of course, never yourself,” wrote Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) in Everybody’s Autobiography. Modernist icon Stein wrote many pseudo-autobiographies, including the well-known story of her lover, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas;but in Lucy Daniel’s Gertrude Stein the pen is turned directly on Stein, revealing the many selves that composed her inspiring and captivating life. Though American-born, Stein has been celebrated in many incarnations as the embodiment of French bohemia; she was a patron of modern art and writing, a gay icon, the coiner of the term “Lost Generation,” and the hostess of one of the most famous artistic salons. Welcomed into Stein’s art-covered living room were the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Pound. But—perhaps because of the celebrated names who made up her social circle—Stein has remained one of the most recognizable and yet least-known of the twentieth-century’s major literary figures, despite her immense and varied body of work. With detailed reference to her writings, Stein’s own collected anecdotes, and even the many portraits painted of her, Lucy Daniel discusses how the legend of Gertrude Stein was created, both by herself and her admirers, and gives much-needed attention to the continuing significance and influence of Stein’s literary works. A fresh and readable biography of one of the major Modernist writers, Gertrude Stein will appeal to a wide audience interested in Stein’s contributions to avant-garde writing, and twentieth century art and literature in general.

The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.

"The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality is a literary history that focuses on four canonical texts - Stein's Tender Buttons (1914), Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), Williams's Spring and All (1923), and Moore's Observations (1924) - grouped together for the purpose of raising a question about the manner in which American literary modernism is traditionally described. Author Christopher J. Knight is interested in the way that the classical "covenant between word and world," now considered fractured, experienced undue pressure from the modernists' earlier project to bridge the gap. With respect to the texts named, Knight argues that there is an evinced desire to think of the work as a vertical, veridical act of discovery. There is, as such, an ambition to collapse representation into presentation and even revelation; an ambition that, while quixotic, is not without formal ("the technique of originality") and political consequences. These consequences are, in fact, the main focus of the book, and in turn, are brought forward to ask further questions about how we periodize American literary modernism(s)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Explores how modernist national narrative successively reimagined the evolutionary epic from the 1910s to the 1930s.

There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority. Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work. A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.

Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century. Sister Brother tells the story of that adventure and relationship. With a personality that drew people toward her?regardless of what they thought of her inventive, hermetic prose?Gertrude Stein dazzled and perplexed. Enigmatic, intelligent, and self-absorbed, Leo also dazzled but in his own way. One of the crucial figures in Gertrude?s early years, he was the original guiding spirit of the famed salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which continued for almost two decades. From her early days as a medical student to her first days in Paris, Gertrude was passionately driven toward the career in which she distinguished herself, demanding appreciation as an exceptional writer who knew precisely what she intended. This book shows how Gertrude slowly struggled with what became a unique voice?and why her brother spurned it. ø With its wealth of new and rare material, its reconstruction of Leo?s famed art collection, and its array of characters?from Bernard Berenson to Pablo Picasso?this biography offers the first glimpse into the smoldering sibling relationship that helped form two of the twentieth century?s most unusual figures.