The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes

The case I make is that the key to Djuna Barnes's notoriously ornate, circular, obscure, hyperbolic style is the neobaroque, a category that refers to the recuperation of the "obsolete" styles, forms, and themes of the historical baroque by twentieth-century writers, both in Europe and the Americas. The baroque, Europe's first, pre-Enlightenment modernity, an alternate modernity and reason later vilified by the Enlightenment and Positivism as an aberration, is recovered when Enlightenment master narratives of reason and progress themselves enter into crisis. The neobaroque can establish a conversation between various critical orientations of Barnes criticism (formalist, feminist, and new historicist readings), as well as offer a transnational perspective on Barnes's modernism.