Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936. Eliot to proclaim the book so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic on her mouth you kiss your own) has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934-1939 Introduction to Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes Johns Hopkins University Press document Additional Information In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1937. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction-there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night and there is Dr. Her book has been considered one of the most influential modernist works (Mann 200). An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Nightwood was published in 1936, but it took a long time to be regarded as her literary masterpiece.

That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna-a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. Nightwood is a well-known novel by Djuna Barnes, who had to spend time in Paris in the 1930s living with lesbians to develop the novel’s content.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch ( Times Literary Supplement).

Nightwood book