Biography EssayJust as the postimpressionists and cubists made us see paint and then made us see painting, Gertrude Stein made us see words and then made us see writing. Immensely various and widerang...
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American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a powerful literary force in the period around World War I. Although the ultimate value of her writing was a matter of debate, in its time it profoundly ...
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"It was not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important," Gertrude Stein once remarked by way of explaining her long-term residence in Paris. She had found in the Fr...
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Just as the postimpressionists and cubists made us see paint and then made us see painting, Gertrude Stein made us see words and then made us see writing. Immensely various and wide-ranging, her work ...
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Gertrude Stein, who lived and wrote as though she knew she would be legendary, is more than that now: she is an icon. The image of Stein, sitting under the Picasso portrait of her in the living room a...
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In his introduction to Gertrude Stein's Four in America (1947) Thornton Wilder observed:She knew that she was a difficult and an idiosyncratic author. She pursued her aims, however, with such convict...
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In the following essay, Goebel probes the interwined crises of personal identity and mortality in Gertrude Stein's fiction.
While still quite young, Gertrude Stein overheard that her parents ha...
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In the following essay, France discusses Stein's relationship with composer Virgil Thomson, featuring a series of selected letters to each other.
In December of 1925, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)...
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In the following review, Savran assesses a 1992 New York City production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in terms of director Robert Wilson's contemporary associations with the play'...
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In the following essay, Neuman details the historical and literary circumstances surrounding the composition and staging of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.
Ida a Novel Becomes an Opera
‘[I]n ...
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In the following essay, Mellow examines the writing style and structures of the plays in Operas and Plays.
The theater of Gertrude Stein is as radical today as it was seventy or more years ago when, i...
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In the following essay, Hutchison contrasts the forms and meanings of A Movie and Film.
In “Portraits and Repetition” [1935], Gertrude Stein related the carefully aggregated details char...
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In the following essay, Pladott assesses Stein's contribution to American drama in terms of her “exile” as an expatriate American woman, a Jew, and a lesbian.
How does one live an...
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In the following essay, Robinson evaluates Stein's plays in the context of her unique voice in the evolution of twentieth-century American theatrical conventions.
While Gertrude Stein was quiet...
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In the following essay, Marranca provides an overview of Stein's life and career.
A few years ago, in the newly redesigned Bryant Park, adjacent to the New York Public Library in mid-town Manha...
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In the following essay, Weiss recounts incidents from Stein's life as a Radcliffe sophomore studying under noted American psychologist William James.
Gertrude Stein was already one of William J...
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In the following essay, Giesenkirchen describes the multilingual dimension of Stein's style in Accents in Alsace, contrasting her famous preference for the English language with her sensitivity...
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In the following essay, Ryan considers “Melanctha” as avant-garde text.
Despite the proliferation of discussion immediately following the appearance of Peter Bürger's theor...
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In the following essay, Ruddick determines “Melanctha” to be Stein's conscious break with nineteenth-century literary standards.
Gertrude Stein thought of herself as having spent ...
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In the following essay, Braddy contends that “Melanctha” demonstrates aesthetic primitivism in its narrative form as well as in Melanctha's characterization.
Three Lives narrates ...
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In the following essay, Hilfer argues that “Melanctha” is a radical empiricist work in the vein of the philosophy of William James, in which “mood is a phenomenological reality.&#...
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In the following essay, Ruddick discusses the “buried psychological allegory” in “Melanctha” that owes much to the psychological studies of William James.
Since the fifties...
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In the following excerpt from his introduction to Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, Sutherland discusses the evolution of Stein's poetics.
The works in [Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poe...
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In the following excerpt, Dickie presents an overview of Stein's role in the early years of experimentation in Modernist poetry.
Early recognition of Stein's importance rested largely on...
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In the following excerpt, Ziarek discusses "Patriarchal Poetry" as an avant-garde work of rebellion against traditional poetic styles.
Apart from explicit references to pleasure and liki...
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In the following excerpt, Koestenbaum describes Stein's poetry as having appealing qualities of indefiniteness and as producing a liberating effect through its lack of focus and disregard of ge...
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In the following excerpt, Knight applies theories of artistic perception to Stein's poetic style in Tender Buttons, emphasizing Stein's desire to create subjective impressions of the wor...
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In the following review, Fowlie praises Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, noting the power of Stein's poetic rhythms.
The poetry published in Gertrude Stein's volume Stanzas in Medi...
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In the following review of Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, Ashbery describes the difficult, ambitious nature of Stein's experiments with language.
[Stanzas in Meditation] will probably p...
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In the following excerpt, Feibleman describes Tender Buttons and Geography and Plays as comically meaningless works, of interest only for the connotative value of their nonsensical words.
The Stein wh...
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In the following essay, Hadas provides a biographical interpretation of Tender Buttons which includes explanations of Stein's feelings for her brother, Leo Stein, their mutual interest in the p...
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In the following excerpt, Schmitz explains some of Stein's puns and identifies humorous references to Alice B. Toklas in Tender Buttons.
The speculative play of Gertrude Stein's humor fi...
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In the following essay, Mizejewski contrasts Stein's perceptions of self in Tender Buttons with examples of how feminist writers of her era treated the theme of female self-perception.
Since Ge...
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In the following excerpt, DeKoven examines Stein's use of nouns in Tender Buttons in the context of Modernist poetry.
Poetry, for Gertrude Stein, is painfully erotic. She defines it in "...
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In the following essay, Schultz discusses Stein's ruminations on her writing career in "Stanzas in Meditation" and her autobiographical prose works.
I often think how celebrated ...
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Stein, Gertrude
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
