Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism

Synopsis

This wide-ranging and provocative study traces Gertrude Stein's production of avant-garde texts that radically disrupted traditional notions of how fiction should be defined, valued, and read. The book combines feminist and postmodern perspectives to illuminate new facets of Stein’s novels and to situate them within an expanded definition of the postmodern. The author argues that if we fail to consider the contexts within which postmodern innovations occur, and if we subsume all formal disruptions under a generalized postmodern mode, we obscure important differences among authors and distort the notion of the postmodern itself.The study expands our understanding of Stein as a novelist and a narrative theorist, repositions her work within a revised notion of literary history, and thus clarifies points of relation and divergence between modernism and postmodernism. It also assists in the historicizing of the postmodern literary emergence by insisting on the centrality of gender as a category of analysis. Finally, it argues for the importance of constructing definitions of postmodernism that will allow space to consider the complexity and diversity of its cultural practices. Curved Thought and Textual Wandering will be welcomed by scholars of modernism, of Gertrude Stein, and of feminist and narrative theory and postmodern culture.

Copyright:

1992

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780472103003

Publisher:

University of Michigan Press

Date of Addition:

08/15/25

Copyrighted By:

the University of Michigan

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.