Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism

AUTHOR-APPROVED 'A thorough and engaged analysis of the entirety of Barnes's oeuvre and the trajectory of her long writing career.' Dr Joanne Winning, Birkbeck College, University of London 'Julie Taylor offers a sophisticated, revisionary interpretation of Djuna Barnes's major writings and, at the same time, a substantial intervention into the theory of modernism and modernist-oriented literary criticism more generally.' Professor Tyrus Miller, University of California at Santa Cruz /Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes's textual corpus/ The writings of the American novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and journalist Djuna Barnes form the basis of a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading: How do we reconcile Djuna Barnes's biographical writing with her Modernist commitment to impersonality? How do we honour the complexities of traumatic experience without pathologising the subject? How might we differently imagine the relationship between Modernism and literary history? Should we take on faith the Modernist repudiation of emotion? And why do we find it so difficult to talk about the pleasures of reading? The five chapters reconsider modernist intertextuality, affect, and subjectivity to produce a series of lively and compelling readings of the major works of the period's most 'famous unknown'. Julie Taylor is Joanna Randall MacIver Junior Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Her work on Djuna Barnes has appeared in /Modern Fiction Studies/ and /Modernism/modernity/.