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The case I make is that the key to Djuna Barnes's notoriously ornate, circular, obscure, hyperbolic style is the neobaroque, a category that refers to the recuperation of the "obsolete" styles, forms, and themes of the historical baroque by twentieth-century writers, both in Europe and the Americas. The baroque, Europe's first, pre-Enlightenment modernity, an alternate modernity and reason later vilified by the Enlightenment and Positivism as an aberration, is recovered when Enlightenment master narratives of reason and progress themselves enter into crisis. The neobaroque can establish a conversation between various critical orientations of Barnes criticism (formalist, feminist, and new historicist readings), as well as offer a transnational perspective on Barnes's modernism.

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This chapter offers a general survey presenting the larger picture of recent developments in new ecological realisms and post-apocalyptic fiction. It establishes the framework for the examination of specific theorists and post-apocalyptic novels and their intersections explored in this study, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory. It sets off the focus on new context-based realisms from related movements such as speculative realism, new and feminist materialisms, and object-oriented ontology. It explores differences between scientific reductivism and new realism, explaining the significance of new realisms of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks and ecologies for establishing the irreducibility of humanistic objects of study. It sets out post-apocalyptic fiction as an alternate variety of context-based ontologies that shift away from the old realism of isolated objects: apocalypse is a way the entire world is. Further, post-apocalyptic fiction’s speculative realism is explored as a new futurist variety of narrative verisimilitude, which adapts the novel’s unique standard of realism to the needs of our own time—the challenges of narrating climate change.