Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.

In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.

Introduction
1. History Lessons: Woodrow Wilson's Idealism and the Rise of the League of Nations
2. On Sleepwalkers and Alcoholism: Government Corruption and the Secret of Room '29
3. Circus Animals and Trainers: Marxist Lessons and the Truth about The World
4. The 'Seductions' of Capitalism: Fortune Telling, Ponzi Schemes and the Magnificent Marthe Hanau
5. On Matthew O'Connor's 'Neurasthenia' and the Wolf in Grandma's Clothes
6. The Fall of the League of Nations: Bad Loans, Bank Closures and Felix's 'Old Masters'
7. Déjà vu: the Gold Standard, the 'New Deal' and the Audacity of Swope
8. Herbert Bayard Swope and the End of The World
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index