Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions

Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions PDF Author: Diane Warren
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351159666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a pioneering female journalist, experimental novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writings anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. In her new book,the author argues that Barnes' writings made significant contributions to gender and aesthetic debates in their immediate early twentieth-century context, and that they continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. In particular, Warren traces the works' close engagement with the effects of cultural boundaries on the individual, showing how the journalism, Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and the early chapters of Nightwood energetically and playfully subvert such boundaries. In this reading, Nightwood is contextualised as a pivotal text which poses questions about the limits of subversion, thereby positioning The Antiphon (1958) as an analysis of why such boundaries are sometimes necessary. Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions shows that from the irreverent and carnivalesque iconoclasm of Barnes' early works, to the bleak assessment that conflict lies at the root of culture, seen from the close of Nightwood, Barnes' oeuvre offers a profound analysis of the relationship between culture, the individual and textual expression.

Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions

Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions PDF Author: Diane Warren
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351159666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a pioneering female journalist, experimental novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writings anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. In her new book,the author argues that Barnes' writings made significant contributions to gender and aesthetic debates in their immediate early twentieth-century context, and that they continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. In particular, Warren traces the works' close engagement with the effects of cultural boundaries on the individual, showing how the journalism, Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and the early chapters of Nightwood energetically and playfully subvert such boundaries. In this reading, Nightwood is contextualised as a pivotal text which poses questions about the limits of subversion, thereby positioning The Antiphon (1958) as an analysis of why such boundaries are sometimes necessary. Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions shows that from the irreverent and carnivalesque iconoclasm of Barnes' early works, to the bleak assessment that conflict lies at the root of culture, seen from the close of Nightwood, Barnes' oeuvre offers a profound analysis of the relationship between culture, the individual and textual expression.

Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Djuna Barnes's Nightwood PDF Author: Bonnie Roos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472533291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood. In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.

Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles

Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles PDF Author: Pavlina Radia
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004314431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book traces the artistic trajectories of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles, examining their literary representations of the nomadic ethic pervading the twentieth-century expatriate movements in and out of America. The book argues that these authors contribute to the nomadic aesthetic of American modernism: its pastoral ideographies, (post)colonial ecologies, as well as regional and transcultural varieties. Mapping the pastoral moment in different temporalities and spaces (Barnes representing the 1920s expatriation in Europe while Bowles comments on the 1940s exodus to Mexico and North Africa), this book suggests that Barnes and Bowles counter the critical trend associating American modernity primarily with urban spaces, and instead locate the nomadic thrust of their times in the (post)colonial history of the American frontier.

The Outside Thing

The Outside Thing PDF Author: Hannah Roche
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford’s Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as “the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside.” Hannah Roche takes Stein’s definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein’s first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall’s Adam’s Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes’s early writing alongside Nightwood. Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the “straight” traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

Improper Modernism

Improper Modernism PDF Author: Daniela Caselli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351928333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
In her compelling reexamination of Djuna Barnes's work, Daniela Caselli raises timely questions about Barnes, biography and feminist criticism, identity and authority, and modernist canon formation. Through close readings of Barnes's manuscripts, correspondence, critically acclaimed and little-known texts, Caselli tackles one of the central unacknowledged issues in Barnes: intertextuality. She shows how throughout Barnes's corpus the repetition of texts, by other authors (from Blake to Middleton) and by Barnes herself, forces us to rethink the relationship between authority and gender and the reasons for her marginal place within modernism. All her texts, linked as they are by correspondences and permutations, wage a war against the common sense of the straight mind. Caselli begins by analyzing how literary criticism has shaped our perceptions of Barnes, showing how the various personae assigned to Barnes are challenged when the right questions are posed: Why is Barnes such a famous author when many of her texts remain unread, even by critics? Why has criticism reduced Barnes's work to biographical speculations? How can Barnes's hybrid, eccentric, and unconventional corpus be read as part of literary modernism when it often seems to sever itself from it? How can an oeuvre reject the labels of feminist and lesbian literature, whilst nevertheless holding at its centre the relationships between language, sexuality, and the real? How can Barnes's work help us to rethink the relation between simplicity and difficulty within literary modernism? Caselli concludes by arguing that Barnes's complex and bewildering work is committed to a high modernist notion of art as a supremely difficult undertaking whilst refusing to conform to standards of modernist acceptability.

Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture

Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture PDF Author: Jennifer Julia Sorensen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317094549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the material forms and circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed, Jennifer Sorensen shows how authors and publishers conceptualized the material text as an object, as a body, and as an ontological problem. She examines works by Henry James, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, showing that they understood acts of reading as materially mediated encounters. Sorensen draws on recent textual theory, media theory, archival materials, and paratexts such as advertisements, illustrations, book designs, drafts, diaries, dust jackets, notes, and frontispieces, to demonstrate how these writers radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. Placing the literary text at the center of inquiry while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what counts as that, Sorensen shows that modernist generic and formal experimentation was deeply engaged with specific print histories that generated competitive media ecologies of competition and hybridization.

Rereading Orphanhood

Rereading Orphanhood PDF Author: Warren Diane Warren
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474464394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Examines literary orphan figures and kinship structures in the nineteenth-century novelExamines a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors from the UK, US, Canada, SwitzerlandProvides an important and unique contribution to fields of family and kinship studiesIncludes an international, contemporary, critically-informed collection of interesting approachesOffers an important intervention in the most cutting-edge work on children's literature and family and kinship studiesRereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship. The chapters in the book explore how orphan characters (both child and adult) contribute to discourses of gender, home, inheritance, illegitimacy, notions of the human and the development of the novel across a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts.

Exploring Text, Media, and Memory

Exploring Text, Media, and Memory PDF Author: Patrizia Lombardo
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8771845828
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Exploring Text, Media and Memory investigates the link between memory and media by asking a series of questions pertinent to our time: How do individual and collective memories blend? How do traumatic experiences from past events and catastrophic projections of the future reveal the human condition in the epoch of frenetic technological reproduction of works of art? How is the human body tied to narrations - and why? A group of international scholars tackle questions like these across art forms, media, and cultural history. In nineteen essays they argue that modern and contemporary literary texts and visual arts show how photography, film, tape recording, television, and internet are not just means of storing memory and information, but objects that we interact with every day - challenging static visions of places and the linear notions of past, present and future.

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature PDF Author: W. Lawrence Hogue
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785272616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

The Grotesque Modernist Body

The Grotesque Modernist Body PDF Author: David Cruickshank
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031543467
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description