Carnivalesque

A few of you mentioned that you might be interested in thinking more about Djuna Barnes. I wanted to recommend the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the "carnivalesque" as a place to begin to think about how Barnes turns her attention towards the transgressive and perverse elements of human life in order to humanize them. For Bakhtin, and other theorists of the carnivalesque, the lampooning of power and the freedom (through spectacle) of transgression made aspects of the carnivalesque deeply related to questions of freedom and emancipation.

Djuna Barnes

While I am loath to recommend using Wikipedia as an authoritative source, I found its entry on Djuna Barnes quite useful. You can read it here. Pay attention to the deatails about its publishing history (how Faber and Faber published it, with an introduction by TS Eliot, in an expensive edition, etc.)