American Nervousness and the Theater

The Story of Gertrude Stein’s Therapeutic Aesthetics

By (author) Torsten Jost

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Extent: 380 pages

Publisher: Brill | Fink

Subjects: Music & Performing Arts

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2026)

ISBN: 9783770569595

6.1 x 9.25 inches

Price: $52.00

On back order

Gertrude Stein developed a singular theory of theater that has long gone unrecognized. Bringing together cultural critique and therapeutic thinking, her work links the analysis of social theatricality in American bourgeois culture with salutary models of aesthetic experience. Rather than in authoritative manifestos, Stein develops this theatrical thinking across novels, essays and autobiographical writings. Situating Stein’s theatrical thought within broader histories of knowledge, this book traces her critical engagement with contemporary philosophical, psychological and medical debates. American Nervousness and the Theater demonstrates how Stein intervenes in modern regimes of attention, reading and spectatorship, while radically reimagining the relationship between literature, theater and everyday practices of self-formation. Stein emerges as an incisive theorist of theater — and, for the first time, of the healing power of queer theatricality.

Torsten Jost is a theatre and performance scholar at Freie Universität Berlin and a researcher in the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.” His work focuses on modern theatre histories and spectatorship as an epistemic practice, with a particular interest in global performance cultures

  • By (author) Torsten Jost