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NightwoodAuthor: Djuna Barnes American Literature Series August 1995 319 pages, 6 x 9 cloth, 1-56478-080-5 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $19.16—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
The version of Nightwood published in 1936 and revered ever since both as a classic modernist work and a ground-breaking lesbian novel differs in many respects from the book Djuna Barnes actually wrote. Unable to find a publisher for her earlier, more explicit versions, Barnes allowed her friend Emily Coleman and her editor T. S. Eliot to cut much material—ranging from a word to passages three pages long—to create a book suitable for publication.
Barnes scholar Cheryl J. Plumb has studied all surviving versions of the work to re-create the novel Barnes originally intended. The Dalkey Archive edition not only restores the main text the material Barnes reluctantly allowed to be cut—along with her preferred spelling and punctuation—but also reproduces in facsimile the seventy pages of discarded drafts that survive of earlier versions. The restored text and related drafts are accompanied by an introduction tracing the novel's composition and by one hundred pages of textual apparatus.
Nightwood is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys: her husband "Baron" Felix Volkbein and their child Guido, and the women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Commenting on them all is Doctor Matthew O'Conner, whose outlandish monologues elevate their romantic losses to the level of Elizabethan tragedy.
Sixty years after its first publication, Nightwood is firmly established as a twentieth-century classic, and this critical edition will allow readers and scholars to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of this unforgettable work.
About the Author
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Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), an American, was one of the key female modernist writers and an important figure in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s and '30s. Barnes spent the final forty years of her life as a recluse in New York City. Though she was largely overlooked during her lifetime and, indeed, had difficulty finding publishers for even her best work, interest in, and acclaim for, her writing has grown since her death. |
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Praise
"[Nightwood possesses] the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a duality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."—T. S. Eliot"It isn't a lah-de-dah prose poem, because it's about what some very real people feel, think, and do. It's . . . one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman."—Dylan Thomas
"I read Nightwood back in the 1930s and was very taken with it. I consider it one of the great books of the twentieth century."—William Burroughs
"Today at sixty, after a dozen readings, I'm as caught up as ever by the novel's gorgeous claustrophobia. . . . If I have to name ten favorite books Nightwood would be among them."—Ned Rorem
"Barnes's verbal talent at times goes into a trance, then wakes again to phrases of amazing beauty. If you enjoy remarkable reading and writing, Nightwood is not to be missed."—Janet Flanner
"It seems to me an undeniable work of genius, and the genius is not intermittent but, with a few lapses, constant throughout and at the same time of unusual intensity. . . . Extraordinary verbal beauty . . . drawn with brilliant wit and force."—Edwin Muir
"Nightwood . . . is one of the top ten novels written this century and is undoubtedly . . . one of the greatest gay novels ever written. It is a magnificent, passionate, lyrical work which probes deep beneath the surface skin of life where so many novels are content to stay. . . . The editor, Cheryl J. Plumb, is to be congratulated . . . It is a work which goes on resonating after every reading."—Gay Times
"The 72 discarded pages, full of Barnes' wonderful poetic prose, alone makes this edition worth purchasing. We need as much of Djuna Barnes' writing available as possible."—Chicago Tribune
"Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th century novel as Finnegans Wake and more readable."—New York Times Book Review