Ryder (American Literature Series) [Paperback]

Djuna Barnes (Author), Paul West (Afterword)

Book Description

Series: American Literature Series | Publication Date: May 1, 1990

From the author of Nightwood: “Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be—vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.”—Argonaut

When it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, a bawdy mock- Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as “the most amazing book ever written by a woman.” One of modern literature’s first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression, Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem, and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. For this edition, several of Barnes’s previously suppressed illustrations have been restored.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically.” (Eugene Jolas - transition )

About the Author

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, and worked as a journalist in New York before leaving the country to spend many years in Paris and London. She returned to New York in 1941, and lived in Greenwich Village until her death.

Paul West was born in 1930 in England, and educated at Oxford and Columbia Universities. Besides 18 novels he is also the author of ten works of non-fiction. He has taught at Brown, Cornell, and Arizona. His honors include a 1993 Lannan Prize for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1996 the French government made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He moved to the US in 1957, and presently resides in Ithaca, New York.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; 2nd edition (May 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0916583554
• ISBN-13: 978-0916583552
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,127,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Achievement, July 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ryder (American Literature Series) (Paperback)

This is an amazing work. A mostly autobiographical parody, Barnes uses Ryder as sort of a twisted extended metaphor for the rest of the world. The beautiful and inventive prose, though often obscure, illustrates the life of the Ryder family poignantly and indignantly. Written in various styles, the book is bound to touch each and every reader.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an astonishing writer, September 22, 2006

By 

Dorothy Parker's aunt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ryder (American Literature Series) (Paperback)

It wasn't only T.S. Eliot who described Djuna Barnes's style as Elizabethan. (Though the poet Marie Ponsot has described her as Jacobean.) What period could encompass this twentieth century writer's talent for casting spells both psychological and atmospheric? I've never read anyone quite like her. If only James Joyce had been a little more talented, he might have been Barnesian--but few of us know this; join us!