Explores the dynamic connections between the affective body and Djuna Barnes' textual corpus. Julie Taylor uses the writings of the American novelist, poet, dramatist, artist and journalist Djuna Barnes to form the basis of a series of disruptive questions about modernist aesthetics and the politics of reading. How do we reconcile Djuna Barnes' 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? 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'.
Key features * Presents a new theory of modernist intertextuality * Based on original archival research conducted at Barnes' archives at the University of Maryland * Includes the first reappraisal of the textual history of The Antiphon for 20 years * Unseats Roland Barthes' dominant ideas about textual pleasure and theory's continued over-valuation of the model of jouissance