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Through a discussion of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Mieke Bal and others, author Michaela Grobbel focuses on the work three women authors as types of performance which lead to re-presentations of memory. These women writers foreground the present but also critically demonstrate the complex relationship of the present to the past. Grobbel's work is a critical addition to any discussion of feminism, memory and literary modernism. ... Read more

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A Revitalized Djuna Barnes
I first read Nightwood in college in 1951; I had never heard of Barnes.Just prior to Nightwood we read The Day of the Locust.I was ready for her, or thought so.Andrew Field has given us a well written fascinating story of this major American writer delving into her history, influences, writing and publication and as much of the inner "her" as might be possible; she remained quite reclusive for the last 40 years of her life in Greenwich Village.Ms Barnes was nothing if not private.Still she strode among the best of our writers in Paris and New York.She doens't flinch, and has low tolerance for those who do.Nightwood is an extraordianry journey into the soul of its author, and many of us.Field helps make her accessable, although I doubt if any one writer could accomplish that. ... Read more

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An illuminating and lucid study which examines the psychological and stylistic aspects of Djuna Barnes's work, including her modernist classic Nightwood,providing a stimulating introduction to a bold and enigmatic writer in the literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. ... Read more

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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, Diane Warren 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. ... Read more

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Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms "late modernist freakish aesthetics"-a creative fusion of "high" and "low" themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about "freaks" by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about "freaks" defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity. ... Read more

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