This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work. Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional notions of selfhood. As more conventional ways of thinking about consciousness became untenable, so too did conventional models of artistic expression.This book shows how Stein and Stevens provide powerful examples of this modern attempt to stage the new subject.

This book traces the presence of the theatre, both literally and metaphorically, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, and examines the parallel depictions of modern 'consciousness' as performance, as 'staging' that are found in both authors' work. Approaching the question of consciousness for these two writers in its specific literary and cultural contexts, the author shows how the concepts of stage and theatre allow both Stein and Stevens to articulate a form of modernist consciousness that is created and self-creating.