Over seven decades, Librarian, Ada Shook, is witness to the racism laced through her Southern city; the paradox of religion as both comfort and torment; and the survival networks created by gay people. Eleven interconnected stories cover the sweep of one woman’s personal history as she reaches her own form of Southern womanhood—compassionate, resilient, principled, lesbian.

Modernism, religion, and queer bodies come together in this study of Djuna Barnes's writings and art. Examining the role of Barnes's theological imagination in relation to a phenomenology of suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment, this book unfolds an intricate synthesis of theology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory to interrogate how queerness informs her art. Providing an original contribution to religious and literary theory, Ng develops a neo-ontological account of melancholy in relation to the myth of the Fall and provides a novel framework for understanding comedy and tragedy in relation to the question of theodicy. Presented in light of a large body of new archival evidence, Barnes's works are also examined for the first time in relation to a wide range of intertextual and intermedial encounters, including the medieval mysticism of Marguerite Porete, Stravinsky's music, 16th- and 18th-century engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Joseph Ottinger, and French and Russian literature from Baudelaire and Lautréamont to Proust and Dostoevsky.

Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes's textual corpus. Julie Taylor uses the writings of the American novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and journalist Djuna Barnes to form the basis of a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading.

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.

Following Djuna reads contemporary novelists in the tradition of Djuna Barnes, arguing for the importance of women's fiction in understanding women's erotics - emotional and sexual exchanges between women. Barnes's Nightwood, with its experimental form and passionate language, has made its mark on contemporary writers, and Carolyn Allen argues that Harris, Winterson, and Brown continue Barnes's explorations of obsession, loss, excess, and power between women lovers. Allen stresses the importance of difference in lovers who are ""like"", and the influence of memory in the making of desire. At the same time, she illuminates the ongoing trade-offs between passion and comfort, and between loss and discovery as crucial to the intensity of women's erotics.

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.

This study looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes's writing. The main contribution of this innovative and scholarly work is the exploration of the editorial changes that T. S. Eliot made to the manuscript of Nightwood, as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman. The archival research presented here is a significant advance in the scholarship, making this volume invaluable to both teachers and students of modern literature and Barnesian scholars.