Book Excerpt! The Outside Thing, By Hannah Roche (introduction)

This theoretically sophisticated reading of three lesbian writers—Stein, Hall, and Barnes—is at once playful and serious. Roche’s insistence on the queerness of desire, romance, and love between women takes feminist modernist studies in an exciting new direction.

~Laura Doan, author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War

To round out our celebration of Valentine’s Day, we are sharing this excerpt from Hannah Roche’s The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance. Roche takes Gertrude Stein’s definition of romance, “the outside thing, that… is always a thing to be felt inside,” as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers: Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. In this introduction to her work, Roche discusses Stein’s definition and the historical context of these writers.

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