ABSTRACT
Nightwood, published in 1936 in Britain and in 1937 in the United States, has secured Barnes’s reputation as a modernist writer. Mostly following T.S. Eliot’s influential introduction,3 critics hailed it as a remarkable new intervention in what was yet to be called modernist literature: for Alfred Kazin it was ‘an experiment in the novel’ and for Dylan Thomas ‘one of three great prose books ever written by a woman.’4 From its publication, however, it was perceived as a dangerous book, too
1 Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1985 [1936]), p. 197. All subsequent references to this edition will be indicated in the body of the text. ‘Darkness visible’ is a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost, I, which Barnes marked in her copy of the Complete Poetry and Selected Prose by John Milton, Introduction by Cleanth Brooks (New York: Dent, The Modern Library, 1950), p. 93. The volume is inscribed ‘Djuna Barnes’ and then again ‘Djuna Barnes, 1952’.
