ABSTRACT
This chapter transitions from the print landscapes of periodicals to the material body of the printed book. Moving from Henry James’s play with the periodical context in the 1890s, I consider Djuna Barnes’s short story “A Night Among the Horses” as it appeared in the December 1918 issue of The Little Review. After reading the story in the particular context of that modernist little magazine, I consider the story in the context of its publication in book format in A Book (1923). This chapter moves between the editorially constructed space of the literary magazine, examining how Barnes’s story interacts with adjacent pieces in the issue, and the different space constructed by Barnes and her publisher for the dazzlingly experimental A Book. I move from my analysis of the differing material forms of the print formats of “A Night Among the Horses” to analyze the fuller evolution and production of Barnes’s A Book – a wildly genre-bending and mixed-media text published and marketed by Boni & Liveright. A Book lays bare the material form of the book and calls for the reader’s interest through its challenging title, its frontispiece with its strange alien gaze, and its experimental mixing of genre: it combines short plays, short stories, five drawings, and interspersed poems. My approach to this little-read but theoretically explosive early work offers new understandings of Barnes’s material aesthetics and allows me to theorize her approach to the differing bodies of the literary magazine and of the book. Both Barnes’s text and the marketing strategies of Boni & Liveright emphasize the strange embodiment of A Book – often linking the text’s heterogeneity to Barnes’s own mystified, gendered body. This chapter offers new understandings of Barnes’s material aesthetics that allow us to consider the shifting meanings of her work when encountered through the differing contexts of the literary magazine and the book format.
