Introduction 1. History Lessons: Woodrow Wilson's Idealism and the Rise of the League of Nations 2. On Sleepwalkers and Alcoholism: Government Corruption and the Secret of Room '29 3. Circus Animals and Trainers: Marxist Lessons and the Truth about The World 4. The 'Seductions’ of Capitalism: Fortune Telling, Ponzi Schemes and the Magnificent Marthe Hanau 5. On Matthew O'Connor's 'Neurasthenia' and the Wolf in Grandma's Clothes 6. The Fall of the League of Nations: Bad Loans, Bank Closures and Felix's 'Old Masters' 7. Déjà vu: the Gold Standard, the 'New Deal' and the Audacity of Swope 8. Herbert Bayard Swope and the End of The World Conclusion Bibliography Index
Explores the historical contexts of Barnes's masterpiece: from depression-era politics and the League of Nations to popular journalism and Modernist literary culture.
Bonnie Roos is Associate Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, USA. Her previous publications include (as co-editor) Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (2010).
Nightwood, when celebrated at all, has traditionally been
celebrated as a sort of sui generis glorious mess: critics are more
likely to gesture toward it reverently than to engage it
critically. In this entirely fresh and surprising reading, Bonnie
Roos succeeds admirably in demonstrating just how carefully and
cunningly wrought Barnes's novel is, and what prodigious cultural
and political work it's still capable of. Roos restores to us the
Nightwood that so entranced and menaced her editor T. S. Eliot, and
in the process, pays tribute to the novel's ungovernable
energies.
*Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Professor of English, Pomona College,
USA*
In her compelling new book Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: The World and
the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos proposes a new critical
perspective on this confounding modernist work of literature and
puts Barnes in the company of other brilliant modernist writers who
politicized their art. Roos helpfully reads Nightwood as
intentionally allegorical in order to contend with the ways in
which Barnes reveals how we both make and forget our collective
histories. As Roos demonstrates through her deft readings of
characters whom she aligns with historical figures prominent in the
US and world popular presses at the time of its writing, Barnes’s
novel is much more than just an experimental, fragmented explosion
of aesthetic pyrotechnics: Nightwood instead becomes a cautionary
allegory of the twentieth century romance with capitalism which
seems doomed to repeat itself in our twenty-first-century moment.
Barnes thus, as Roos claims, asks her readers to fill in the
silences predicated by dominant perspectives on history. Although
she concludes that Barnes did not hold any optimistic belief that
we could overcome our reliance on the hegemony of capitalism, Roos
does suggest, through her carefully nuanced interpretations of the
novel, that Nightwood prompts the question of how we might begin to
“learn from history,…move…from reading to activism, from art to
life” (29). A welcome addition to the existing scholarship on
Barnes, Bonnie Roos’s argument that Nightwood can best be
understood as a narrative (re)presenting subaltern experiences of
history in the twentieth century secures her rightful place in the
canon of literary modernism
*Emily M. Hinnov, Senior Lecturer of English, Granite State
College, USA*
[...] an absorbing and illuminating study of a difficult work. By
situating Nightwood in the political and social history of l’entre
deux guerre, Roos has changed dramatically the critical discussion
about Barnes and her intriguing novel.
*John Xiros Cooper, Professor of English, University of British
Columbia, Canada*
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