Synopses & Reviews
Three Livesis comprised of the stories "The Good Anna," "Melanchtha," and "The Gentle Lena." "Melanchtha" is an adaptation of Q.E.D., Stein"s first completed novel, which remained unpublished until four years after her death.
"Contexts" is divided into two sections'""Biography" and "Intellectual Backgrounds"'"that highlight the inspirations for and evolutions of Three Livesand discuss the difficult reception Stein"s experimental writing met with in the publishing world.
"Criticism" collects 19 chronologically arranged essays on Stein"s life and work, from pieces written during the decades in which her work was regarded as important primarily for its influence on writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson to the more laudatory scholarship of recent years. Feminism and form, queer studies, interrelations of race and sexuality, African American studies, and primitivism and eugenics are all represented. Among the critical pieces are William Carlos Williams"s commentary on Stein"s complexity and originality, Richard Bridgman"s study of Stein"s work as a possible compensation and camouflage for her lesbianism, and Lisa Ruddick"s essay connecting feminist analysis to theories of consciousness.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Synopsis
is comprised of the stories "The Good Anna," "Melanchtha," and "The Gentle Lena."
Synopsis
This Norton Critical Edition includes both and , first published in 1909 and 1950, respectively.
About the Author
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874. As a child she lived in Vienna and Paris before returning to the United States to study at Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins Medical School but left before taking her degree. In 1903 Stein moved to France where she lived with Alice B. Toklas. Her first novel, Three Lives, was published in 1909. Its prose style is highly unconventional and virtually dispenses with standard punctuation. Tender Buttons (1914) was even more experimental and sold extremely poorly. Other work by Stein include her theory of writing, Composition and Explanation (1926), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), two volumes of memoirs, Everybody's Autobiography (1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Stein died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1946.Marianne DeKoven is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of A Different