BOOK NEWS: Suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment in Djuna Barnes's work

Djuna Barnes and Theology: Melancholy, Body, Theodicy

BY ZHAO NG

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350256064

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/djuna-barnes-and-theology-9781350256064/

Modernism, religion, and queer bodies come together in this study of Djuna Barnes's writings and art. Examining the role of Barnes's theological imagination in relation to a phenomenology of suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment, this book unfolds an intricate synthesis of theology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory to interrogate how queerness informs her art.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Providing an original contribution to religious and literary theory, Ng develops a neo-ontological account of melancholy in relation to the myth of the Fall and provides a novel framework for understanding comedy and tragedy in relation to the question of theodicy.

Presented in light of a large body of new archival evidence, Barnes's works are also examined for the first time in relation to a wide range of intertextual and intermedial encounters, including the medieval mysticism of Marguerite Porete, Stravinsky's music, 16th- and 18th-century engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Joseph Ottinger, and French and Russian literature from Baudelaire and Lautréamont to Proust and Dostoevsky.

Zhao Ng is a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Her articles have been published by or are forthcoming with English Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, symploke, Literature and Theology, and Religion & Literature.