Nightwood

"It was Virginia Woolf who delivered [an attack] on realism in the novel, but Miss Barnes has gone beyond Mrs. Woolf's practice of her own theory. For Miss Barnes is not even concerned with the immediate in time that fascinated the stream-of-consciousness novelists. In her novel poetry is the bloodstream of the universal organism, a poetry that derives its coherence from the meeting of kindred spirits...The story of the novel is like the biological routine of the body; it is the pattern of life, something that cannot be avoided, but it has the function of a spring, and nothing more. It is in their release from mere sensation, or rather the expression of such an attempted release, that Miss Barnes's characters have their being."Barnes, Djuna is the author of 'Nightwood', published 2006 under ISBN 9780811216715 and ISBN 0811216713.