Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781351159678
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Women and literature; History; Decadence in literature; Lesbians in literature; Regression (Civilization) in literature; Lesbian heroines in literature; Femmes et littérature; Histoire; Décadence dans la littérature; Lesbiennes dans la littérature
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, 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."--Provided by publisher
Table of contents: title: Chapter 1 The Critical Context  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 2 Travels with the Pen Performer  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 3 '"Everything is true that is honoured"' 1  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 4 'gleanings from the shores of Mytilene': 1 Parody, Pastiche and the Almanack  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 5 Dying to be an Individual  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 6 '"Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories"' 1  -- Diane Warren; title: chapter 7 'the fadged up ends of discontent' 1 -- Diane Warren.