Djuna Barnes' Consuming Fictions

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a journalist, novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writing anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. And yet, no recent book-length work of literary criticism has considered all her major works. In her new book, Diane Warren argues that Barne's writings were significant in their immediate early twentieth-century context, in which gender boundaries were being...
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Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a journalist, novelist, playwright, and poet whose influence on literary modernism was profound and whose writing anticipated many of the preoccupations of poststructuralist and feminist thought. And yet, no recent book-length work of literary criticism has considered all her major works. In her new book, Diane Warren argues that Barne's writings were significant in their immediate early twentieth-century context, in which gender boundaries were being effectively redrawn, and continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. In particular, Warren demonstrates how Barnes's texts subvert the constraints placed on identity-formation, particularly in the case of middle-class femininity, in the early part of the 20th century. In considering all of her major writings, Warren illuminates the danger of assessing individual texts, such as Barnes's best-known novel, Nightwood, in isolation.