Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes's textual corpus. The five chapters of this book reconsider modernist intertextuality, affect, and subjectivity to produce a series of lively and compelling readings of the major
Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture is a unique mix of cultural studies, literature, and visual arts applied to the discrete materiality of modernist objects. Contributors explore the many tensions surrounding the modernist relationship to objects, things, products and artefacts through the prism of poetry, prose, visual arts, culture and crafts.
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.
Modernist Wastes is a profound new critical reflection on the ways in which women writers and artists have been discarded and recovered in established definitions of modernism. Exploring the collaborative auto/biographical writings of Djuna Barnes and the artist, poetic and Dada performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Caroline Knighton reveals how these very processes of discarding, recovery and re-use can open up new ways of understanding a distinctively female modernist artistic practice. Illustrated throughout with artworks, original letters and manuscript facsimiles, the book draws on new archival discoveries to place the feminist recovery of neglected female voices at the heart of our understanding of modernist and avant-garde literary culture.
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.
After a long period of neglect, emotions have become an important topic within literary studies. This collection of essays stresses the complex link between aesthetic and non-aesthetic emotional components and discusses emotional patterns by focusing on the practice of writing as well as on the impact of such patterns on receptive processes. Readers interested in the topic will be presented with a concept of aesthetic emotions as formative both within the writing and the reading process. Essays, ranging in focus from the beginning of modern drama to digital formats and theoretical questions, examine examples from English, German, French, Russian and American literature. Contributors include Angela Locatelli, Vera Nünning, and Gesine Lenore Schiewer.
Today interviews proliferate everywhere: in newspapers, on television, and in anthologies; as a method they are a major tool of medicine, the law, the social sciences, oral history projects, and journalism; and in the book trade interviews with authors are a major promotional device. We live in an 'interview society'. How did this happen? What is it about the interview form that we find so appealing and horrifying? Are we all just gossips or is there something more to it? What are the implications of our reliance on this bizarre dynamic for publicity, subjectivity, and democracy? Literature and the Rise of the Interview addresses these questions from the perspective of literary culture. The book traces the ways in which the interview form has been conceived and deployed by writers, and interviewing has been understood as a literary-critical practice. It excavates what we might call a 'poetics' of the interview form and practice. In so doing it covers 150 years and four continents. It includes a diverse rostrum of well-known writers, such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, William Burroughs, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison, while reintroducing some individuals that history has forgotten, such as Betty Ross, 'Queen of Interviewers', and Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's profligate son. Together these stories expose the interview's position in the literary imagination and consider what this might tell us about conceptions of literature, authorship, and reading communities in modernity.
Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction provides a fresh approach to reading material things in modern fiction, accounting for the interplay of the material and the cultural. This volume investigates how Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys use the short story form to evoke the material world as both living and lived, and how the spaces they create for challenging gendered social norms can also be nonanthropocentric spaces for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Using the unique knowledge created by literary works to spark new conversations between phenomenology, cognitive studies, and new materialisms, complemented with a feminist perspective, this book explores how literature can touch the basic experience of being in, feeling and making sense of a material world that is itself alive and active. From a sensitive reading of how three women used the material world to make their readers see, feel, and question the norms shaping our experience, this volume draws a theory of reading affective materiality that illuminates modernism and the short story form but also reaches beyond them.
This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.
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.