The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar

Dear All,

In our second session of the term Elizabeth Pender (Cambridge University) will be leading a discussion of Barnes's short stories. Bringing together a selection of these stories, and paying particular attention to the revisions that occured in later collections, discussion will include a consideration for the ways in which the stories relate to different periods of Barnes's writing (the different contexts of those produced early in her writing career, whether the stories should be seen as precursors to the novels and how Barnes's substantial revisions for Spillway interpret and alter the earlier stories); the way the stories articulate a stance in relation to modernism and to modernism's gender politics; the network of other writers that the stories allude to; the original publication of some of the stories in The Little Review and other little magazines and collections; the status of A Night Among the Horses as a collection, with poems and plays as well as stories; the contrasts (if any!) between the stories in the 1929 collection and the stories later published in Smoke and Other Stories; the noticeable recognisability of Barnes's writing across a number of different literary forms and publication contexts; and/or other points that arise in the course of the seminar


The stories suggested for discussion are:

'The Terrible Peacock' 'The Jest of Jests'
'A Night Among the Horses' (1929 version)
'The Robin's House' 'The Passion' (1929 version and revised version)
'A Little Girl Tells A Story to A Lady' ['Cassation'] (1929 version)

Anyone pressed for reading time is encouraged to concentrate on the *four later stories*, which will be the focus of the discussion. Some of the stories were substantially revised for Spillway (1962), and it would be great if we could look at the revisions to 'The Passion'.

The stories can all be found in Collected Stories (1996), ed. by Phillip Herring, in their revised versions. The 1929 versions of 'A Night Among the Horses', 'A Little Girl Tells A Story to A Lady' and 'The Passion' can be found in A Night Among the Horses (1929) OR in Lawrence Rainey's Modernism: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2005). If needed, texts can be sent, please contact me separately if this is the case.