Name: Ryder
Price: 18.78 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Djuna Barnes
ISBN: 9781628974980

Type

Physical Book

Author

Illustrated by

Epilogue by

Publisher

Language

English

Pages

250

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9781628974980

Synopsis "Ryder"

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.Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of eccentricity and anarchy; through sparkling detours and pastiche, cult author Djuna Barnes spins an audacious, intricate story of sexuality, power, and praxis.Ryder, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many things--lyric, prose, fable, illustration; protagonist, bastard, bohemian, polygamist. Born in the 1800s to infamous nonconformist Sophia Grieve Ryder, Wendell's search for identity takes him from Connecticut to England to multifarious digressions on morality, tradition, and gender. Censored upon its first release in 1928, Ryder's portrayal of sexuality remains revolutionary despite the passing of time and the expurgations in the text, preserved by Barnes in protest of the war "blindly raged against the written word." The weight of Wendell's story endures despite this censorship, as his drive to assume the masculine roles of patriarch and protector comes at the sacrifice of the women around him.A vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, Ryder, evinces her cutting wit and originality. The nonlinear structure and polyphonic narration pull the reader into Barnes' harlequin world like a riptide, echoing the melodic cascade of James Joyce's Ulysses and the avant-garde feminism of Dorothy Richardson. The novel is a rhapsodic saga that could have come only from Barnes' pen--and politics--as impactful today upon at its first pressing, a document of sexual revolution and censorship.

Djuna Barnes

(Author, Illustrated by)

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(Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, 1892 - New York, 1980) American writer. After being privately educated by her father and grandmother, she moved to New York to study art. She quickly became part of the avant-garde in Greenwich Village, where she met, among others, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. Around the 1920s, like almost all American artists and writers, she moved to Paris. During the interwar years, she frequented major figures from the world of cinema and literature, from Charles Chaplin and Marcel Duchamp to James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Alexis Carrel, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway.

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