Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus

In her compelling re-examination of Djuna Barnes's work, Daniela Caselli raises timely questions about Barnes, biography and feminist criticism, identity and authority, and modernist canon formation. Through close readings of Barnes's manuscripts, primary and critical texts, Caselli tackles one of the central unacknowledged issues in Barnes: intertextuality. She shows how throughout Barnes's corpus the repetition of texts, by other authors (from Blake to Webster) and by Barnes herself, forces us to rethink the relationship between authority and gender. Caselli begins by analyzing how literary criticism has shaped our perceptions of Barnes, showing how the various personae assigned to Barnes are challenged when the right questions are posed: Why is Barnes such a famous author when many of her texts remain unread, even by critics? Why has criticism reduced Barnes's work to biographical speculations? How can Barnes corpus be assimilated into a canon of literary Modernism when reading her work in the light of her hybrid, eccentric, and unconventional sexual identity seems to signal its distance from this modernist canon? How do Barnes's texts question normativity, in terms of gender, textuality, and biography? Caselli's book concludes with a rethinking of simplicity and difficulty from an intertextual viewpoint that points toward a reframing of classic modernist problems in literature and the arts.