Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays on the work of Djuna Barnes, including her early journalism, poetry, prose, visual art, and drama.
Trade Review“Shattered Objects is an embarrassment of riches: Barnes and affect studies; Barnes and film studies; Barnes and animal studies; Barnes and queer studies. I could go on and on with its generous contributions, but let it be said that, for once and for all, this collection proves her to be a supreme modernist amongst her towering peers. Across these super-sharp pieces she now shines brightest in that grand constellation of twentieth-century experimental art.”
—Scott Herring,author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture
“With Shattered Objects, we at last get a full look at [Barnes’s] broad range of artistic achievements.”
—Megan N. Liberty Brooklyn Rail
“Shattered Objects offers an invaluable revision of how we understand one of modernism’s most beguiling authors.”
—Peter Adkins The Modernist Review
“This handsomely-produced and carefully-assembled collection bespeaks a certain maturity in ‘Barnes studies,’ while also pulling off the trick of recognising that term’s problematic status, given the author’s mocking resistance to all that we associate with author studies: a consolidated academic community, a firm sense of literary periodicity, a relatively stable aesthetics stance, a coherent world-view.”
—Tim Armstrong Affirmations of the Modern
“Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz’s wide-ranging collection ultimately reveals the ‘difficult’ Djuna Barnes to be the talented and versatile Djuna Barnes--a writer of sheer modernist multiplicity--about whom there will always be more to say.”
—Jade French Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz
Part 1: Modernism in Print
1 Djuna Barnes on the Page
Alex Goody
2 Djuna Barnes’s Short Stories in A Night Among the Horses (1929) and Spillway (1962)
Elizabeth Pender
Part 2: Human and Beast
3 Nightwood ’s Humans
Rachel Potter
4 Djuna Barnes’s Creatures in an Alphabet: From A for Anecdotage to Z for Zoomancy
Bruce Gardiner
5 Djuna Barnes, Thelma Wood, and the Making of the Lesbian Modernist Grotesque
Joanne Winning
Part 3: Barnesean Style
6 The Critique of Modernist Wit: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
Drew Milne
7 “Trees of Heaven”: Djuna Barnes’s Late Metaphysical Verse
Cathryn Setz
8 “If Some Strong Woman”: Djuna Barnes’s Great Capacity for All Things Uncertain
Daniela Caselli
9 “The Havoc of Nicety”: Djuna Barnes’s Ryder and the Catastrophe of Epochal Change
Tyrus Miller
Part 4: Modernist Afterlives
10 Djuna Barnes: The Flower of Her Secret
Melissa Jane Hardie
11 Making Contact: Affect, Queer Historiography, and “Our Djuna”
Julie Taylor
Afterword
Peter Nicholls
Selected Bibliography
Elizabeth Pender
Notes on Contributors
Index
