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Nightwood

 By Djuna Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, Thomas Stearns Eliot

Book overview

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force, has become a classic of modernist and lesbian literature since its first publication in 1936. Set in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna during the decadent period between the two World Wars, Nightwood "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS).

Limited preview - 2006 - 182 pages - Fiction


Other editions

Edition 2 - 1946 - No preview available

Reviews

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) VNU Business Media, Inc.
As the editor of this new version of Bames's 1936 erotic classic avers, ""the story of Nightwood's composition and coming to print is an extraordinary story."" Unfortunately, Plumb (English/Pennsylvania State) is not the one to tell it. Her apparatus-heavy edition, while definitive for scholars, will only confuse readers looking for a reliable text of what Barnes wrote. Despite all the lists of
emendations, textual notes, hyphenations, and historical collations, it's never very clear exactly what was taken out from Barnes's version by her friend Emily Coleman and her editor, T.S. Eliot. While Coleman, an early and steadfast advocate of a book rejected by countless publishers, was motivated by aesthetic concerns, Eliot feared the censor. Barnes, for her part, was willing to do almost anything to get her poetic narrative into print. That she herself never restored it to this version during her lifetime suggests she may well have been satisfied with the later editions. In any case, the reproductions of surviving early manuscript pages will satisfy scholars who might otherwise be insulted by the elementary ""explanatory annotations"" (for ""Goethe,"" ""Uffizi,"" ""Voltaire,"" ""Morpheus,"" and so on). 

Common terms and phrases

Places mentioned in this book  Maps  KML

Vienna - Page 46
an unplanned eagerness that he was taken aback to find himself accepted, as if Robin's life held no volition for refusal. He took her first to Vienna. ...
more pages: 20 36 47 61 88 117 122 130
Budapest - Page 60
They travelled from Munich, Vienna and Budapest into Paris. Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her ...
Berlin - Page 33
To the Cafe de la Maine du VIe he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. ...
more pages: 15 49
Paris - Page 33
To the Cafe de la Maine du VIe he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. ...
more pages: 12 20 37 48 60 78 79 88 166
Marseilles - Page 97
In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it's that memory that haunts me. ...
more pages: 139 166
Clermont-Ferrand - Page 22
happened in the long back of yesterday look up the manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, it's all one to me; ...
Rome - Page 92
and that's why it has never been countenanced or understood to this day. Wait, I'll be coming to that! All through the night Rome went burning. ...
more pages: 6 61
Haarlem - Page 172
Lahore - Page 26
I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand ...
Naples - Page 166
New York - Page 59
she kept in touch with even when she was not working with it (some of its people were visitors to her house), came into New York in the fall of 1923. ...
Tunis - Page 8
The full length windows (a French touch that Guido thought handsome) overlooking the park were curtained in native velvets and stuffs from Tunis, ...
Munich - Page 61
There were circus chairs, wooden horses bought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, Venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich, ...
Madrid - Page 106
it," he said with a grin, "wrapped in a shawl of Spanish insight and Madrid fancy (as a matter of fact, the costume came later, but what do I care? ...
more pages: 8
Milano - Page 108
a wrack of scolds from Milano, and my heart that will be weeping still when they find my eyes cold, not to mention a thought of Cellini in my crib of ...
Hamburg - Page 135
I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame ...
Venezia - Page 142
widower with a small son, scarcely ten by the clock when, presto — the boy was bitten by a rat while swimming in Venezia and this brought on a fever. ...
Dublin - Page 26
woman and a cow she had dragged with her, and behind that someone from Dublin saying, 'Glory be to God!' in a whisper at the far end of the animal. ...
Boston - Page 112
as if she were talking to an express on its way into Boston, and dragging her shawl and running, and we all got in — she'd collected some guests who ...
London - Page 138
And speaking of being destroyed, allow me to illustrate by telling you of one dark night in London when I was hurrying along, my hands before me, ...
San Francisco - Page 17
Matthew O'Connor, an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the ...
Singapore - Page 139

References to this book

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From Google Scholar

Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical ...
David Herman - 1997 - Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
Loneliness
Hildegard E Peplau - 1955 - The American Journal of Nursing
Nervous landscapes
DENIS R BYRNE - Journal of Social Archaeology
Forbidden Love
Elizabeth Wilson - 1984 - Feminist Studies
All Scholar search results »

Popular passages

Rousseau, she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in a drawing room (in the apprehension of which the walls have made their escape), thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of woodwind render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness.Page 38
The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll.Page 16
We wash away our sense of sin, and what does that bath secure us? Sin, shining bright and hard. In what does a Latin bathe? True dust. We have made the literal error. We have used water, we are thus too sharply reminded. A European gets out of bed with a disorder that holds the balance. The layers of his deed can be traced back to the last leaf and the good slug be found creeping. L'Echo de Paris and his bed sheets were run off the same press. One may read in both the travail life has had with him...Page 96
Very well - what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking.Page 145
Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache - we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.24 Barnes...Page 41
When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear— if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused— might lose the scent of home. Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the...Page 64
In the old days I was possibly a girl in Marseilles thumping the dock with a sailor, and perhaps it's that memory that haunts me. The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for a future, and am I to blame if I've turned up this time as I shouldn't have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as big as the king's kettle, and a bosom as high as the bowsprit of a fishing schooner?Page 97
Old Europe': aristocracy, nobility, royalty. . . . He felt that the great past might mend a little if he bowed low enough, if he succumbed and gave homage." Immediately after seeing Robin, Felix confesses to the doctor that he "wished a son who would feel as he felt about the 'great past.Page 12
When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions. As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin.Page 75
The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface.Page 38

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