Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein’s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein’s writing. Following Stein’s own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein’s primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein’s texts.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. A Primer for Primary Stein Sharon J. Kirsch and Janet Boyd Chapter 1. Make It Plain: Stein and Toklas Publish the Plain Edition Gabrielle Dean Chapter 2. Woolfenstein, the Sequel Rachel Blau DuPlessis Chapter 3. “Come too”: 1920s Erotic Rights Discourse and Gertrude Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry” Jody Cardinal Chapter 4. Long Dull Poems: Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation and Wordsworth’s The Prelude Rebecca Ariel Porte Chapter 5. tender buttons, notwithstanding Neil Schmitz Chapter 6. How to Read How to Write: Bothering with Gertrude Stein Sharon J. Kirsch Chapter 7. Framing Devices: Reading Background in the Sequence of Gertrude Stein’s Composition Linda Voris Chapter 8. Radio Free Stein: Rendering Queen and Country Adam Frank Chapter 9. “A Spare American Emotion” E. L. McCallum Chapter 10. “More light!—Electric Light.” Stein in Dialogue with the Romantic Paradigm in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights Sarah Posman Chapter 11. Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of Literature Janet Boyd Chapter 12. Modernist and Future Ex-Modernist: Postwar Stein Kristin Bergen Chapter 13. History, Narrative, and “Daily Living” in Wars I Have Seen Phoebe Stein Chapter 14. Mrs. Reynolds: Stein’s Anti-Nazi Novel Steven Gould Axelrod Appendix A: A Note on the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers in the Twenty-First Century Nancy Kuhl Appendix B: “The Gertrude Stein Collection” reprinted from The Yale Gazette 22.2 (October 1947) Donald Gallup Index Notes on contributors