Off and on, during the entire period they were together, Gertrude and Alice wrote each other little love notes. Calling her "wifey" and most often addressing her as "baby precious," Stein scribbled her love for Toklas in quick moments of unselfconscious desire, notes that are small but significant testimonies to her long-lived love. And on occasion, Toklas penned or typed letters back to her "husband." These notes are brief, mantra-like enticements: tender, beseeching, caring and confessing, funny and game, sexually-charged and sincere, quotidian and queer, but always passionate. Each one marks the pleasures--infrequently, the pains--of married love. When fitted together, the notes create a tantalizing mosaic of a marriage between two women that was built to last.

In a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford’s Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as “the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside.” Hannah Roche takes Stein’s definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein’s first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall’s Adam’s Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes’s early writing alongside Nightwood. Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the “straight” traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

From 1941 to 1943, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein translated for an American audience thirty-two speeches in which Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government, outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with its Nazi occupiers. Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake such a project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, her apparent Vichy protector. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, treating their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination.

Although often hailed as a 'quintessentially American' writer, the modernist poet, novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) spent most of her life in France. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Gertrude Stein in Europe is the first sustained exploration of the European artistic and intellectual networks in which Stein's work was first developed and circulated. Along the way, the book investigates the European contexts of Stein's writing, how her own work intersected with European thought, including phenomenology and the vitalist work of Henri Bergson, and ultimately how it was received by scholars and artists across the continent. Gertrude Stein in Europe opens up new perspectives on Stein as a writer and on the centrality of artistic and intellectual networks to European modernism.

"One of the best introductions to Gertrude Stein's work I've ever read. Joan Retallack's research is thorough and impressive, and she has done an outstanding job of assembling a valuable and interesting collection of Stein's writings."--Hank Lazer, author of Lyric & Spirit "This exquisitely edited volume of Gertrude Stein's writings is far more informative than the usual 'selected works.' Out of the immense opus that Stein produced over a long and prolific career, Joan Retallack has chosen telling pieces, so as to show both the extraordinary thematic, generic, and stylistic variety, and the coherence of her life's work. Meanwhile, Retallack's delightful and informative introduction can stand on its own as a luminous contribution to our understanding of Gertrude Stein's work and her place in literary history. The fascinating documents that end the book can be regarded as the sweet at the end of a fully satisfying and memorable experience. This is an essential book for both new and long-term discoverers of the wonder of Gertrude Stein's writings."--Lyn Hejinian, author of The Language of Inquiry "Retallack's illuminating introduction is a vital contribution to our knowledge of Stein, revelatory of such issues as racism while viewing Stein's presence on the page and in the ear as performative play that creates a sensual apprehension of a new time (a perception of the activity of happiness). The selections and introduction demonstrate how Stein changed reading and perceiving."--Leslie Scalapino, author of It's go in horizontal

Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century’s preeminent experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research at Harvard’s psychological laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Medical School. This book shows how her extensive scientific training continued to exert a profound influence on the development of her extraordinary literary practices.

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein’s work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein’s radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where she travelled in the 1920s and the spatial relations of landscape painting, Stein presents a new model of meaning whereby making sense is an activity distributed in a text and across successive texts. From love poetry, to plays and portraiture, Linda Voris offers close readings of Stein’s most anthologized and less known writing in a case study of a new method of interpretation. By practicing Stein’s innovative means of making sense, Voris reveals the excitement of her discoveries and the startling implications for knowledge, identity, and intimacy.

DIVExplores the links between the emergence of lesbian and proto-lesbian identities at the turn of the century and the discourses of sentimentality, mass culture, and modernism./div

*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism* *A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012* The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Taking its title from Danger Mouse's pioneering mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album, Kevin Young's encyclopedic book combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical choruses to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, "jazzing." What emerges is a persuasive argument for the many ways that African American culture is American culture, and for the centrality of art—and artfulness—to our daily life. Moving from gospel to soul, funk to freestyle, Young sifts through the shadows, the bootleg, the remix, the grey areas of our history, literature, and music.