Gertrude Stein /

The author of an earlier book on Stein (They Watch Me As They Watch This, CH, Jun'91), Bowers has now written a critical introduction to Stein's life as it informs the difficult early narratives, poems, and plays. What are now common assumptions about Stein's writings are revisited with clarity and with the convictions of feminist and poststructuralist theory. Stein's struggles with modernist aesthetics and her eventual break with her brother Leo are recounted to emphasize their differences. Stein's increasing interest in writing as process, her love of repetition, her insistence on description as the stuff of narratives, her decisively undramatic plays--all are recast as deliberate and calculated challenges of genre. The results of all that ingenuity are manifest in The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons, Three Lives, and Operas and Plays. Each text is capable of producing rewards (moments of "ingenious joy") for readers willing to surrender to Stein's compositions. Recommended especially for undergraduate collections. S. Pathak; Johns Hopkins University