Nightwood The Original Version and Related Drafts (Hardcover)
| Author: Djuna/ Plumb Barnes |
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Product Details:
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
ISBN-10: 1564780805
ISBN-13: 9781564780805
Sku: 30289025
Publish Date: 8/1/1995
Dimensions:
(in Inches) 9.25H x 6.25L x 1T
See more in Classics
| The version of Nightwood published in 1936 and revered ever since both as a classic modernist work and a groundbreaking 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 3 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 to the main text the material Barnes reluctantly allowed to be cut - along with her preferred spelling and punctuation - but also reproduces in facsimile the 70 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 a 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 two women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Commenting on them all is Doctor Matthew O'Connor, 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. |
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From the Publisher:
The version of Nightwood published in 1936 and revered ever since both as a classic modernist work and a groundbreaking 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 3 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 to the main text the material Barnes reluctantly allowed to be cut - along with her preferred spelling and punctuation - but also reproduces in facsimile the 70 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 a 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 two women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Commenting on them all is Doctor Matthew O'Connor, 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. |
Annotation:
Djuna Barnes balked at tradition and revolted against the conventional linear development of plot with this slim volume, which has long been considered her masterpiece. The work is an investigation into fin de siècle decadence and alienation as experienced by a lesbian, a falsely pedigreed baron, an American expatriate journalist, and a shady doctor who all cross paths in Paris.
Djuna Barnes balked at tradition and revolted against the conventional linear development of plot with this slim volume, which has long been considered her masterpiece. The work is an investigation into fin de siècle decadence and alienation as experienced by a lesbian, a falsely pedigreed baron, an American expatriate journalist, and a shady doctor who all cross paths in Paris.
Author Bio
Djuna Barnes
Barnes was privately educated, and later studied at Pratt Institute and the Arts Students League. During the 1920s, feeling estranged from society, Barnes fled to Paris, where she was influenced by the work of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Upon returning to New York in 1939, she became a virtual recluse, seldom leaving her house in Greenwich Village. Barnes is best known for her avant-garde work, in which she expressed a marked fascination for the grotesque; she is also celebrated as one of the first women writers to deal frankly with lesbianism in her work. Although she published poetry in Harper's Weekly, she is best known for her novel, NIGHTWOOD.
Praise
New York Times Book Review
"It was Virginia Woolf who delivered [an attack] on realism in the novel, but Miss Barnes has gone beyond Mrs. Woolf's practice of her own theory. For Miss Barnes is not even concerned with the immediate in time that fascinated the stream-of-consciousness novelists. In her novel poetry is the bloodstream of the universal organism, a poetry that derives its coherence from the meeting of kindred spirits...The story of the novel is like the biological routine of the body; it is the pattern of life, something that cannot be avoided, but it has the function of a spring, and nothing more. It is in their release from mere sensation, or rather the expression of such an attempted release, that Miss Barnes's characters have their being." - Alfred Kazin 3/7/1937 Nation
"For brilliance and formal beauty few novels of any age can compare with [this one]. But one must also say how desperate it is. Mr. Eliot condemns in advance any reader who feels superior to the three chief persons of the narrative, all of whom belong to the third sex. That, however, is not the point. The point is that Miss Barnes has strained rather than enriched our sensibilities. Nightwood is more fascinating than interesting." - Mark Van Doren 4/3/1937 Washington Post Book World
"Barnes memorialized her lost love in a great work of lamentation, 'Nightwood' in prose of haunting musicality and splendor...she can also be quite vulgarly funny...Shocking, confusingly structured, lyrical and haunting...Besides presenting Barnes's original vision of her masterpiece, Plumb's edition also provides useful textual and explanatory notes, as well as reproductions of the surviving typescript pages." - Michael Dirda 11/12/1995 Voice Literary Supplement
"...a slim novel about American expatriates in Paris, about lesbians and a male transvestite, and a dubious, dolorous Austrian aristocrat...an overwhelming, anarchic cry of passion...and an ingenious threnody about the disreputable nature of desire." - Edmund White 11/1995 London Review of Books
"Barnes writes of her characters as if they were animals in the pages of a biology textbook, suddenly appearing in a dictionary of Greek gods." - Gaby Wood 07/04/1996
"It was Virginia Woolf who delivered [an attack] on realism in the novel, but Miss Barnes has gone beyond Mrs. Woolf's practice of her own theory. For Miss Barnes is not even concerned with the immediate in time that fascinated the stream-of-consciousness novelists. In her novel poetry is the bloodstream of the universal organism, a poetry that derives its coherence from the meeting of kindred spirits...The story of the novel is like the biological routine of the body; it is the pattern of life, something that cannot be avoided, but it has the function of a spring, and nothing more. It is in their release from mere sensation, or rather the expression of such an attempted release, that Miss Barnes's characters have their being." - Alfred Kazin 3/7/1937 Nation
"For brilliance and formal beauty few novels of any age can compare with [this one]. But one must also say how desperate it is. Mr. Eliot condemns in advance any reader who feels superior to the three chief persons of the narrative, all of whom belong to the third sex. That, however, is not the point. The point is that Miss Barnes has strained rather than enriched our sensibilities. Nightwood is more fascinating than interesting." - Mark Van Doren 4/3/1937 Washington Post Book World
"Barnes memorialized her lost love in a great work of lamentation, 'Nightwood' in prose of haunting musicality and splendor...she can also be quite vulgarly funny...Shocking, confusingly structured, lyrical and haunting...Besides presenting Barnes's original vision of her masterpiece, Plumb's edition also provides useful textual and explanatory notes, as well as reproductions of the surviving typescript pages." - Michael Dirda 11/12/1995 Voice Literary Supplement
"...a slim novel about American expatriates in Paris, about lesbians and a male transvestite, and a dubious, dolorous Austrian aristocrat...an overwhelming, anarchic cry of passion...and an ingenious threnody about the disreputable nature of desire." - Edmund White 11/1995 London Review of Books
"Barnes writes of her characters as if they were animals in the pages of a biology textbook, suddenly appearing in a dictionary of Greek gods." - Gaby Wood 07/04/1996
