Djuna Barnes's Nightwood

Bonnie Roos is Associate Professor of English at West Texas A&M University, USA. Her previous publications include (as co-editor) Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (2010).

Nightwood, when celebrated at all, has traditionally been celebrated as a sort of sui generis glorious mess: critics are more likely to gesture toward it reverently than to engage it critically. In this entirely fresh and surprising reading, Bonnie Roos succeeds admirably in demonstrating just how carefully and cunningly wrought Barnes's novel is, and what prodigious cultural and political work it's still capable of. Roos restores to us the Nightwood that so entranced and menaced her editor T. S. Eliot, and in the process, pays tribute to the novel's ungovernable energies.

• Introduction 1. History Lessons: Woodrow Wilson's Idealism and the Rise of the League of Nations 2. On Sleepwalkers and Alcoholism: Government Corruption and the Secret of Room '29 3. Circus Animals and Trainers: Marxist Lessons and the Truth about The World 4. The 'Seductions’ of Capitalism: Fortune Telling, Ponzi Schemes and the Magnificent Marthe Hanau 5. On Matthew O'Connor's 'Neurasthenia' and the Wolf in Grandma's Clothes 6. The Fall of the League of Nations: Bad Loans, Bank Closures and Felix's 'Old Masters' 7. Déjà vu: the Gold Standard, the 'New Deal' and the Audacity of Swope 8. Herbert Bayard Swope and the End of The World ConclusionBibliographyIndex