User:DeRossitt/Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein

Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein is a 1978 book by literary scholar Wendy Steiner.

Overview
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Reception
Mary Ann Radzinowicz in Journal of American Studies: Since no summary of Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance can do justice either to its conceptual richness or Ms. Steiner's clarity in her use both of historical and of structuralist and semiotic techniques of analysis, it is worth pointing out simply that the book alters one's understanding of Gertrude Stein.... Gertrude Stein in the account becomes understandable even as she is revealed to be increasingly unenjoyable. Gertrude Stein stands forth at the end, if not apologized for, at least so substantial in heroic failure as to have been given heroic significance.

Michael J. Hoffman in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology: Most of these books are of interest only to committed Stein buffs. The appearance, however, of Wendy Steiner's book on Stein's portraits is of interest not only to the committed Steinian but also to any serious student of modernism. It is the kind of book that could not have been written a decade ago. If such books on Stein continue to appear, we may well be on our way to a much deeper understanding of what Stein's literary project was all about.

Lynne Waldeland in Modern Fiction Studies: Wendy Steiner's Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein, for all its apparent narrow focus, is an amazingly comprehensive study of Stein's work.

Steiner has written a very impressive book, the best on Stein since Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces. She approaches Stein with the belief that her work is important if not always successful, and, most important for the sub ject she has chosen, she treats Stein's theoretical statements as significant, not as afterthoughts and rationalizations for an eccentric art. This book provides the reader with a comprehensive sense of Stein's literary career, her major artistic ideas, and the ideas of the time in which she lived.

Peter Warren MacKinlay in Modern Philology: Steiner's examination of Stein's literary portraiture is a rigorous analysis of interesting but much neglected works. Steiner maintains that these portraits are self-consciously programmatic and accepts Stein's critical framework for viewing her own career.... Stein scholars and devotees should welcome this new addition to the growing canon of Stein criticism.... Steiner's Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance is a fine analysis of Stein's obscure studies in portraiture and an enlightening perspective of a profoundly complicated facet of the long and varied career of Gertrude Stein.

P. M. S. Dawson in The Review of English Studies: A resourceful and tenacious reader of Steinian texts, Dr. Steiner is successful in cracking a number of obscure passages and demonstrating that the details of her portraits are in fact often motivated by aspects of the person portrayed.

As long as we continue to read Stein for the exemplary demonstration she provides of central modernist problems we shall find it profitable to consult Steiner on Stein.

Marjorie Perloff in The Yearbook of English Studies: on the face of it, a convincing argument but it somehow fails to do justice to Gertrude Stein's verbal and rhetorical skills.

dissertation, Exact Resemblance subjects Gertrude Stein's work to what strikes me as an over-refined system of classification.

These caveats aside, Wendy Steiner has written an important and valuable book on a fascinating subject.

Perloff praises "The care with which she relates the verbal to the visual"