Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism

Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism is now out with Pennsylvania State University Press as part of their Refiguring Modernism Series. The book responds to expansions of canons and critical questions that have shaped modernist studies since the late twentieth century, and it brings new thinking to Barnes’s full oeuvre and to the study of modernism. It is the first collection of critical essays on Djuna Barnes since 1993. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Daniela Caselli, Bruce Gardiner, Melissa Hardie, Tyrus Miller, Drew Milne, Rachel Potter, Julie Taylor, and Joanne Winning, and Peter Nicholls has contributed an afterword.

Barnes wrote in a letter, “there is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole object”: the surfaces of Barnes’s literary and art objects are reflected in myriad ways in the chapters here. Essays consider Barnes’s work in relation to mass media; the promotion, publication, and reception of modernism; modernists as critics; wit; authorship, legitimacy, and genealogy; anachronism; late style; the reception of metaphysical poetry; the queer grotesque; the representation of humans, outcasts, animals, and selves; sovereignty; borders of nation and language; the book as object in film remediations; the affects involved in reading and criticism; and structures of queer community. The introduction surveys the relationship between Barnes criticism and criticism of modernist writing from the early twentieth century to the present, and the afterword reads Barnes’s style against Eliot’s modernism. Shattered Objects introduces a Barnes who is full of possibility for current and future work in the literary critical discourses of the twenty-first century.

You can find Shattered Objects on the Penn State University Press web site at: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08220-2.html

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