description: ". . . a compendium of little known facts, wild surmises, dark suspicions, odd coincidences, and educated guesses. . ." Central to the book is an investigation of Gertrude Stein's remarkable preoccupation with murder, from a simple enjoyment of Hammett and Chandler to an obsession with murderous literary and historical parallels to her own life. Decade after decade, in page after page of writing which it seemed no one woujld ever read, she portrayed herself in the role of Lizzie Borden, Beatrice Cenci, Lucrezia Borgia, as if by repetition and confession she could atone for a crime in her own "famly living" which had set her and her borther Leo free to invent the Twentieth Century once they had killed the nineteenth century dead, dead, dead. Along the way, this exercise in literary detection unearths some amusing, surprising, and disturbing parallels in the life and work of her Modernist contemporaries, as inidcated in the book's Table of Murder and ModernismAn Unnatural Gertrude Stein’s own Murder MysteryFrom the Rue de Fleurus to West 35th (Rex Stout and the secret origins of Nero Wolfe)Faust and the Artificial ViperKilling The Century In Which You Are BornThe Angel of the Third Reich (Gertrude Stein's disturbing fascist sympathies and activities up to and during the German occupation of France)Jeeves Would Have Known What To DoThe Bordens, the Borgias, and the SteinsNot Every Rose Is A RoseThe Cannibal Who Came To Dinner (Willie Seabrook's amazing intervetion in the major creative crisis of Gertrude Stein's life)The Nearest Thing To Being T. S. Eliot’s Heart Of Darkness The Beast in the Jungle
language: English
title: Detecting Gertrude Stein, and Other Suspects on the Shadow Side of Modernism
titlecomplete: Detecting Gertrude Stein, and Other Suspects on the Shadow Side of Modernism
publisher: Democritus Books