Modernism/modernity

Arguing for Djuna Barnes as a significant modernist writer has not always been an easy task. Despite her persistent presence in historical accounts as the author of the modernist curiosity Nightwood, her connections to the Provincetown players, her association with other modernist women such as Mina Loy and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and her belated co-option into lesbian or queer canons, Barnes's reputation has fluctuated over the last century. Where Loy has achieved a central place in modernist poetics and Baroness Elsa has become the mother of dada, Barnes has proven less easy to assimilate into contemporary modernist studies—Tyrus Miller, for example, situates her within Late Modernism in his 1999 book. But now, in the UK most prominently, Barnes's reputation is in the ascendancy. Caselli's volume joins other recent studies—Diane Warren's Djuna Barnes's Consuming Fictions and Monika Faltejskova's Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism—in approaching Barnes with the rigor and enthusiasm she rightly deserves.¹ The growing enthusiasm amongst UK graduate students and Faculty alike shows that Barnes scholarship finds very fertile ground on this side of the Atlantic.

What is most impressive about Improper Modernism is Caselli's refusal simply to rehearse existing accounts (whether theoretically or biographically derived) of Barnes's writing. This is not the case in the other recent examinations of Barnes's work. Faltejskova reiterates, with a few extra details, an almost exhausted story of T. S. Eliot's editorial interference in Barnes's Nightwood and The Antiphon claiming that his "desire to help [Barnes] was complicated by his gendered attitudes towards women's writers [sic], who constituted a challenge to Eliot."² In her [End Page 478] chronological study of Barnes's oeuvre Warren works with an explicitly feminist methodology, claiming "a clear conceptual development" from early to later work and drawing on the seemingly inevitable theoretical names—Irigary, Cixous, Kristeva, Butler, Mulvey, Bakhtin.³ But Warren does make some interesting suggestions, arguing for the Nietzschean influence in Nightwood, and providing detailed accounts of the intertextual relations of Barnes's writing—between Elizabeth Stanton's Women's Bible and Barnes's Ryder; Shakespeare's Titus Adronicus, The Tempest, and King Lear and Barnes's The Antiphon.Caselli's Improper Modernism is also interested in intertextual connections and influences, but it is both more far-ranging and more fully based in extensive archival research than any previous study. This book not only explores the journalism, short stories, and major works (Ryder, Ladies Almanack, Nightwood, The Antiphon) but engages with the Book of Repulsive Women, Barnes's poetry, her last publication, Creatures in an Alphabet, and the pseudonymous work. Caselli refuses to simplify Barnes's extensive and diverse oeuvre by turning it into a narrative, whether this narrative tells of a linear chronological development, an easy fit with feminist or queer theory, or a despoiling by male editorial interference. Instead Caselli attempts, as her subtitle indicates, to explore a "Bewildering Corpus" that appears fundamentally anomalous. It is the anachronisms, deceptive simplicities, performances, and linguistic complexities of Barnes's writing as well as her presence in modernism that interest Caselli and provide the impetus for her study. Improper Modernism covers the performative articulations of Barnes's short stories and journalism, the double perspectives of Ladies Almanack, the linguistic and referential strategies of her poetry, her use of the figure of the child to undo the facticity of innocence and naturalness, the exploration of vision and perspective in Nightwood, and the staging of history and revenge in Ryder and The Antiphon. Caselli is most convincing when challenging critical complacencies about Barnes or making active use of archival sources.

Caselli's study is, indeed, thoroughly researched and extensively annotated, with voluminous footnotes directing the reader towards correspondence, marginal notes made by Barnes in the books she owned and read, reviews, and critical material in French, Italian, and German as well as English. Caselli's reading of the first encounter with...