SUMMARY
JOYCENSTEIN examined the cultural and literary history of the competitive and antagonistic relationship between the modernist writers James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In doing so, the project investigated the relationship between literary style, reception, and legacy, while also examining factors that contributed to literary reception in the modernist era such as gender and gendered labour, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, literary style, and literary networks. Examining Joyce and Stein’s extensive output of literary writings, but also the correspondence and life writing produced by their overlapping circle of friends and collaborators, the project investigated how literary biographies and cultural and literary histories of an era impact upon literary reception. The project challenged extant histories of Joyce and Stein’s relationship by focusing on the inconsistencies and inaccuracies identifiable in life writing from the era, while also initiating a wide ranging critical reassessment of Joyce’s relationship with his women contemporaries in the arts and literature.
CONTEXT
James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are icons of literary modernism. Notorious and central to the movement’s genesis and evolution, participants in early celebrity culture, they represent modernist literature at its most transgressive and avant-garde. Both exiles (from Ireland and America, respectively), they lived alongside one another in Paris for twenty years, regularly appeared in the same literary magazines, kept overlapping circles of friends, and published some of the era’s most innovative texts. Both also fostered a strong animosity towards one another, developed radically divergent styles of writing and – as a direct consequence of both of these factors – are rarely considered in tandem by critics of the period. Instead, they have come to serve as useful critical touchstones for the diverse styles practised by writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Dorothy Richardson, with Joyce and Stein related separately to these figures, or grouped in separate modernist pairings. JOYCENSTEIN has sought to disrupts this arrangement. Rather than continuing to keep Joyce and Stein separate, the project examined how their modernisms truly compare, and how their works have been exploited to serve and support critical models of modernist styles and our understanding of the modernist era.
MAIN OBJECTIVES
The main objective of JOYCENSTEIN was to conduce the first ever comparative study of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, both in terms of their literary writings and their awareness of and engagement with each other via their overlapping network of friends in Paris in the 1920s and thereafter. Beyond this core objective, the project sought to initiate a broader, interventionist study of the reception of modernist women in relation to Joyce, and how inaccuracies or prejudices in life writing and contemporaneous histories of the modernist erahave influenced present-day understandings of the period.
