Following Djuna Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss [Paperback]

Allens book will... provide the categories that will deepen our understanding of lesbian relationships and of lesbian fiction. Lesbian Review of Books

Barnes scholars will... want to pick up Carolyn Allens new book, for it not only offers perceptive readings of Nightwood and the Little Girl stories..., but traces the example of Barness exploration of lesbian power and loss in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown, and the underrated Bertha Harris. Review of Contemporary Fiction

... fascinating... [a] fine volume... Choice

Following Djuna is a fascinating analysis of the textual erotics and lyrical seductions of the work of Djuna Barnes and the writers she influences. This scintillating genealogy of lesbian intertextuality... expands the field of lesbian and feminist literary inquiry and concepts of lesbian literary production. Judith Roof

As lesbian literary history, here is an instant classic. Jane Marcus

This is an important and necessary book; even further, speaking as an admirer of the writers and literary works it discusses and as a personal expert on lost love, I find Following Djuna irrestible. Karen Helfrich, Lambda Book Report

Carolyn Allen argues for the importance of womens fiction in understanding womens eroticsemotional and sexual exchanges between women.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction DJUNA BARNES AND BERTHA HARRIS
Reading Erotic/Following Djuna

Part One DJUNA BARNES
The Erotics of Nurture
1. Nightwood: Gender, Narcisism, and the Erotic Maternal in the Narrative of Nora Flood
2. Writing toward Nightwood: Seduction in the Little Girl Stories

Part Two JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Erotics of Risk

Part Three REBECCA BROWN
The Erotics of Excess and the Difficulties of Difference

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

CAROLYN ALLEN, Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington, has published articles on 20th-century writerl#{