Djuna Barnes's Nightwood The World and the Politics of Peace [Paperback]

Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece,Nightwood.

InDjuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaperThe Worldto demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism ofThe World- in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.

Nightwood, when celebrated at all, has traditionally been celebrated as a sort ofsui generisglorious 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 theNightwoodthat 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 bookDjuna 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 readsNightwoodas intentionally allegorical in order to contend with the ways in which Barnes revealsl3ã