The Modernist Night: Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Louis Aragon, and Djuna Barnes

This thesis examines representations of the night in modernist prose. It studies how four modernist writers were inspired by the new, brightly lit night in the development of their writing and understandings of the modern urban experience. Chronologically, this study goes from the last decade of the 1800s to the 1920s. It begins by exploring anxieties about the changing night displayed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It then considers James Joyce’s depiction of subversive female experience found in the modern Dublin evening in Ulysses (1922). After this, the focus of the thesis shifts forward in time to Paris — a city known for its lights and nightlife — and considers two works set in the 1920s. First, it looks at Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) and the text’s characterizations of the dreamlike qualities of the everyday before reading the importance of the night walk in developing the author’s understanding of the surreal experience of the frisson. Finally, it explores Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and the ways in which it uses the darkness of night in both its style and form, showing a strange, distant figure — the modern somnambule — who disrupts what is seen and understood, unsettling the text through her silence and mystery.
This thesis argues that across these works of modernist prose, a distinct appreciation of the night as a vital and productive space becomes evident. These writers reevaluate the significance of the night during an era in which it underwent dramatic changes. This thesis explores how these writers registered these changes and responded to the newly illuminated and busy nightscape of modernity by crafting texts that seek and portray benighted experiences. In doing so, it aims to illustrate the importance of the night in the shaping of both the experience of modernity and of modernism itself.