In the following essay, Dalton discusses the role of incest and child abuse in Barnes's work, especially in her play, The Dove.

In the following essay, Edmunds asserts in a discussion of Barnes's Ryder, that "Barnes makes repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a virgin's violation to foreground the ultimate complicity between middle-class reformers and the structures of oppression they would reform, while eschewing the scandalous appeal to fact on which such projects depend."

In the following essay, Reesman compares Barnes's Nightwood to Dante's The Divine Comedy.

In the following essay, Nimeiri discusses the symbolic significance of the Americanness of the characters in Barnes's Nightwood.

A Book, published in 1923, is a collection of twelve stories, three one-act plays, eleven poems, and a half-dozen pencil portraits…. A Night Among the Horses and Other Stories (1929) is a reprint of A Book with the addition of three stories…. All of the material in A Book reflects the American milieu, and the stories added to A Night are presented against a European background. This change reflects Miss Barnes's nineyears' residence in Europe prior to the 1929 publication of A Ni...

In the following essay, Levine traces how Barnes's early journalism influenced her fiction, especially Nightwood.

In the following essay, Mailloux uses Barnes's correspondence to reconstruct a significant period in the writer's life.

In the following essay, Michel analyzes the role of sexual identity in Barnes's life and works.

In the following essay, Giroux discusses his experience as an editor working with Djuna Barnes.

[Nightwood] is most often remembered for its high reputation with writers like T. S. Eliot. Apart from this sort of recognition it is examined either as a cache of modernism or, because it is rather tangled and obscure, it is sometimes rewarded with an extravagant explication de texte. In short, it has not been much appreciated by critics while among novelists, notably Hawkes and Pynchon, it resonates. Hawkes picks up on the blighted landscape and the fictive detachment which allows Barnes to make comedy of...

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.

Whatever the techniques—traditional or experimental—Barnes's work is concerned with ways of being reconciled to life's random misfortunes. In the stories of Spillway there is often an emotional "spillway" that rechannelizes feelings of helplessness and isolation. Its specific form may not be pleasurable, yet still it exists as an alternative to the completely isolated personality. For some characters who are whirled about by stimuli they never quite understand, the ...

In the following review, Dirda discusses Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes and the reprinting of Barnes's Nightwood.

In the following review. Seymour asserts that while "[Barnes has been partly revealed [in Phillip Herring's Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes]: a bigger and bolder exposure is still needed."]

One is liable to expect other people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. I have read Nightwood a number of times, in manuscript, in proof, and after publication. What one can do for other readers—assuming that if you read this preface at all you will read it first—is to trace the more significant phases of one's own appreciation of it. For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciat...

In the following review, Robins discusses what the drawings in Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes, edited by Douglas Messerli, say about society during Barnes's era.

Here [in Smoke and Other Early Stories] are fourteen stories, startlingly strange, cranky even, but also as raw and exciting as swigs of poteen…. What in their compelling way these stories do is to mythicize cosmopolis, in its most audacious and grotesque modern manifestation, as the urbs of New York, New York. Even the tiny clutch of these fictions that are about Europe and country people, or about a century other than our own, read like modern New York fiction in potential: as if all earlier times ...

[Nightwood] has attracted a small circle of admirers who have been awed by Barnes's extraordinary ability to infuse macabre or grotesque subject matter with haunting beauty, but the general consensus seems to be, with a few notable exceptions, that an excessive lack of verisimilitude makes it something less than a masterpiece. Nightwood has not yet been recognized as a truly great piece of American fiction simply because we have failed to fully appreciate the fact that it does not depict human intera...

Recently Time magazine, pernicious as ever, dismissed the Selected Writings of Djuna Barnes by saying that the best of her work, Nightwood, offered little more than "the mysterioso effect that hides no mystery," and even Leslie Fiedler has described Djuna Barnes' vision of evil as effete. Yet all her myth and fear are mightily to be envied. Surely there is unpardonable distinction in this kind of writing, a certain incorrigible assumption of a prophetic role in reverse, when the most ba...

To the audience which has received Nightwood with admiration, Miss Barnes' long play in verse [The Antiphon] seems a strange concoction: in subject it is wholly modern, but in conception and execution no more modern than Maxwell Anderson's period pieces in verse. The Antiphon is set in 1939 (during the war) in the English ancestral halls of the Burley family, and the exterior reminders of a world at war become a metaphor for the interior war within the characters as well as between the sexes a...

Miss Barnes is one of those few writers whose thought and expression become more felicitous, the more painful the theme she is dealing with; [in Nightwood] she resembles Webster and Baudelaire. There is no trace of a hopeful or even a hopeinspiring philosophy in her book: her vision is purely tragic, with that leavening of sardonic wit which comes from long familiarity with tragedy: the almost professional note which one also finds in Webster and Baudelaire, but which, though a source of pleasure in itself,...

Mr. Eliot is right when he says of ["Nightwood"] that it is "really 'written'" [see excerpt above]. It is too consistently "written" for quotations to mean much, nor does any sentence contain the whole. Yet if Mr. Eliot is also right in the analogy he suggests with poetry, the book can be searched for good "lines." And they are easily found. Some of them are witty She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to ...

"Smoke: And Other Early Stories" [a collection of Barnes's earliest writing, published in 1982] doesn't contain any major work and so is probably not the best place to begin reading Barnes. But for those who know her writing the early stories will give fascinating glimpses of the way a light style evolved into the high and tragic manner of "Nightwood." The main strength of the early stories lies in their sharp and comic cameo portraits and Barnes's witty, if ...

Passages of The Antiphon and all of [Miss Barnes's] few recently published poems seem both in and out of time. They project the modern sense of despair and disillusionment that the 1920s left to successive generations of writers, while they continue to sustain the note of generalized or universal misery of Doctor O'Connor's monologues in Nightwood. Their lines are intensely worked and tightly constructed into complex units that stand firmly on their own ground, independent and resistant...