Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

As in the past few years, so in 2009, a few authors germane to this chapter attract more critical attention than others, although this year occasions at least one surprise. Frank Norris regained particular notice last year, perhaps because his work was brought to the attention of scholars again by McElrath and Crisler's definitive biography of the author (see AmLS 2006, pp. 251-52). Apart from Norris, the other principal recipients of critical attention are mostly those of 2008: Gertrude Stein, Jack London, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Theodore Dreiser, and Nella Larsen. Moreover, several authors of the Harlem Renaissance in addition to Du Bois—namely, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset—were each the subject of two or three important essays. This point surely warrants recognition for the expanding interest it reveals in that remarkable gathering of black intellectuals and artists chiefly in and around Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s.

However, a gradual change, not a fortunate one, is also occurring, regardless of the literary work under consideration. The fiction examined in a few essays this year and last has been subordinated to the critical theory presumably applied to clarify, explain, or otherwise elucidate it. The effect in at least two or three instances this year is more confusion than clarification. If theory is to predominate, which it should not unless it is specifically prioritized, it had better be clearly—albeit briefly—explained before being applied to the fiction at hand. When this major step is overlooked, the value of the essay—including the idea behind it, its thesis, and its conclusion—is lost. However "interesting" a theory may be, it should above all enable readers to better understand and appreciate a literary work.

i. Gertrude Stein

In her compact critical biography Gertrude Stein (Reaktion) Lucy Daniel covers the years of Stein's youth in America sufficiently to support her many claims. Stein's expatriate Parisian years are well accounted for as is the war period she spent in a French village. Daniel also portrays Alice B. Toklas well without minimizing her importance as Stein's consultant or overwriting her relationship as Stein's "spouse." Her discussion of selected writings is clear and informative; those on such major works as The Making of Americans and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are especially rewarding. Daniel often illuminates Stein's puzzling statements by explaining that the author uses the words for themselves rather than their meaning in any given context. Stein enjoyed open-endedness, she says, and "saw no other way to write or live. . . . There is nothing final about it." "Her work was an exploration of indeterminacy"; because she created her own life in it, separating them is virtually impossible. Despite lacking a useful table of contents, chronology, or index, Daniel's biography is a helpful introduction.

Also biographical but with a decided focus first on Stein's interest in things American and second on her reception in the United States is Karen Leick's Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (Routledge). Leick regards Stein's life in three stages after opening the book with the intriguing statement "Gertrude Stein was an American icon in the 1930s." Leick explains the basis for the author's surprising popularity in the United States when Stein and Toklas returned to visit in 1934. Although Stein's work was largely incomprehensible to most Americans and few were aware of her lesbian lifestyle, many had admired Toklas's recently published "autobiography." What appealed to the majority of those eager to see, hear, and meet Stein, however, was her close association with many of the major artists, writers, and musicians who frequented her salon in Paris, as well as her congeniality, openness, candor, informality, and good humor. In short, she became the subject of a cult of personality, and Leick emphasizes that Stein's affection for America and Americans was mutual.

Three essays centering on Stein address literary influence and methodology. Ulla Haselstein's "A New Kind of Realism: Flaubert's Trois Contes and Stein's Three Lives" (CL 61: 388-99...