Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
Fiction that falls into this category may be of any genre, such as historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance.
Djuna Barnes (/ËdĘuËnÉË/ JOO-nah; June 12, 1892 â June 18, 1982) was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
In 1913, Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By early 1914, Barnes was a highly sought feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city's leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes's talent and connections with prominent Greenwich Village bohemians afforded her the opportunity to publish her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines, and publish an illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).
Nightwood is a 1936 novel by American author Djuna Barnes that was first published by publishing house Faber and Faber. It is one of the early prominent novels to portray explicit homosexuality between women, and as such can be considered lesbian literature.
It is also notable for its intense, gothic prose style. The novel employs modernist techniques such as its unusual form or narrative and can be considered metafiction, and it was praised by other modernist authors including T. S. Eliot, who edited the novel, helped publish it, and wrote an introduction included in the 1937 edition published by Harcourt, Brace. As a roman à clef, the novel features a thinly veiled portrait of Barnes in the character of Nora Flood, whereas Nora's lover Robin Vote is a composite of Thelma Wood and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Jenny Petherbridge is Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf, and Felix Volkbein is derived from Frederick Philip Grove.