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Ryder
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, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.

"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—a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." (The Argonaut)

"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." (Eugene Jolas, transition)

"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." (WLW Journal Winter 91)

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Ryder
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, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.

"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—a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." (The Argonaut)

"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." (Eugene Jolas, transition)

"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." (WLW Journal Winter 91)

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Ryder

Ryder

Overview

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, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.

"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—a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." (The Argonaut)

"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." (Eugene Jolas, transition)

"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." (WLW Journal Winter 91)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781628975239
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date: 06/25/2024
Series: Dalkey Archive Essentials
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 250
Sales rank: 223,204
File size: 20 MB
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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.

Read an Excerpt

Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, and beyond the coming and the going of thee and thine, and yet beyond the ending thereof,—thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end,—for such need thee not, nor see thee, nor know thy lamenting, so confounded are they with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring, and the multiple damnation of those multitudes that shall be of thy race begotten, unto the number of fishes in thin waters, and unto the number of fishes in great waters. Alike are they distracted with thy salvation and the salva­tion of thy people. Go thou, then, to lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity, for these shall not repulse thee, thy physical body and thy temporal agony, thy weeping and thy laughing and thy lamenting. Thy rendezvous is not with the Last Station, but with small comforts, like to apples in the hand, and small cups quenching, and words that go neither here nor there, but traffic with the outer ear, and gossip at the gates of thy insufficient agony.

What People are Saying About This

Eugene Jolas

"A work of grim, mature beauty...she has cought life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men have succeeded in giving us."

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