Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein (review)

“The Great Djuna:” Two Decades of Barnes Studies, 1993–2013

“…With the receding presence of non‐human animal life from the burgeoning metropolis and mechanized existences, Armstrong reads Barnes as “an apotheosis of the modernist writing of the animal” (150, emphasis added), a problematic mode of writing in which boundaries between self and other, human and animal, master and slave – even the form and ground of figuration itself – become blurred, collapsed and sometimes dangerously reasserted in proto‐fascistic or “restless[ly] utopian” visions (152), as subsequent Barnes scholars have explored (see Hubert, Jonsson , and Rohman , ). Armstrong's reading is highly suggestive, prompting as it does a careful consideration of the author beyond the critical assumption of textual fluidity, conflated with what Caselli describes as a too‐vague notion of transgressive revolutionary potential (, 408).…”

“…Second, 2000 to 2007 saw a body of work appearing in light of new studies of modernist literature and history. Since 2008, thirdly, following landmark scholarly works, the field has benefited from the development of new critical tools and literary‐historical narratives with which to consider Barnes's “bewildering corpus” afresh (Caselli ). The following outline is therefore intended as a rough guide only: an introduction with which the reader may go on with his or her own inquiry, as new research develops the various currents of thought mapped out below.…”