Djuna Barnes Critical Essay | Critical Review by Georgette Fleischer

SOURCE: "Light on Nightwood," in Nation, Vol. 261, No. 17, November 20, 1995, pp. 628-32.

In the following review, Fleischer praises Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes for its accuracy, but complains that Cheryl Plumb makes too many assumptions about the editing of Barnes's Nightwood in her republication of the original version.

We've never known what to do with our literary geniuses, particularly blasphemous parodists like Emily Dickinson (coy) and Gertrude Stein (mannish), who subvert gender conventions and radically alter literary forms—perhaps the former is prerequisite to the latter. Djuna Barnes is no exception.

Or is she? Unlike Dickinson and Stein, almost everything Barnes wrote that she considered complete was published in her lifetime, and her 1936 novel Nightwood has never since its 1946 reissue by New Directions been out of print. Then why, when Dickinson's stature matches Walt Whitman's and Stein's cachet supersedes Ernest Hemingway's,...
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