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.
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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.
