Bringing together modernism, religion and queerness and presenting Djuna Barnes's original contribution to questions usually monopolised by philosophy and systematic theology such as 'is life worth living?', this book proposes a dialectic of melancholy and theodicy as a structural frame for the work of art.
Queer, avant-garde, expatriate - these are the terms in which the American writer and artist, Djuna Barnes, is often lauded. Earlier assessments, however, report moving, sustained meditations on theological questions: from T.S. Eliot, Emily Coleman, to Kenneth Burke, the force of Barnes's imagination on grace and damnation, Heaven and Hell, has been registered. Why then, has this theological dimension fallen away from later criticism on Barnes? How might the queerness of Barnes's art and life be implicated in a challenge to theology? Finally, in what way does sexuality feature in Barnes's trinity of self-avowed commitments: 'Beauty, art, and religion'?
Presented in light of a large body of new archival evidence, Barnes's works are also unfolded for the first time in relation to intertextual and intermedial encounters with her literary, theological, musical, and visual aesthetic interlocutors, ranging from medieval mysticism (Marguerite Porete), modern music (Stravinsky), 16th and 18th-century engravings (Albrecht Durer, Joseph Ottinger), to French and Russian literature (Baudelaire, Andre Breton, Dostoevsky), and 20th-century theology from Paul Tillich to Martin Buber.