TY - BOOK ID - 77901861 TI - Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' PY - 2022 SN - 0748699341 0585441847 9780585441849 9780748699346 0748611983 9780748611980 PB - Edinburgh DB - UniCat KW - Genius in literature. KW - Modernism (Literature) KW - Stein, Gertrude, KW - Staĭn, Gertruda, KW - Stein, Gertruda, KW - Criticism and interpretation. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77901861 AB - GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748611980);Gertrude Stein frequently called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean for her? Stein's claims to genius are legendary, appearing frequently throughout her texts and public lectures. Were they the signs of excessive egotism, of desperate self-advertisement, or of something else entirely? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of 'genius' to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential and essentializing notion of 'genius' to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic textual process. It considers how this revisionary idea of 'genius' came to correspond with Stein's identification of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's seemingly paradoxical decision to call a text about being a genius in America, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to 'genius' and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualising the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.Key FeaturesA scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attentionThe first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a geniusOffers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernismCombines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinkingOriginal, theoretically informed and consistently well-written.Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001." ER -