Focused on H.D.’s late writing in The Sword Went out to Sea and Helen in Egypt, Lheisa Dustin takes a psychoanalytic approach to what she calls the “language of suffering.” Dustin’s book is Ghost Worlds and Invisible Giants: H.D., Djuna Barnes, and the Language of Suffering (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021).

The book is available in hardback and ebook formats.

About the book:

“Lheisa Dustin draws on Lacanian theory, Buddhist thought and feminist scholarship to offer densely argued interpretations of work by H.D. and Djuna Barnes. Focusing particularly on the two women’s challenging use of language, Ghost Words and Invisible Giants acknowledges academic and spiritual sources while suggesting fresh ways of making sense of enigmatic linguistic tendencies and patterns. This study will be of particular interest to readers in literary modernism, spirituality and psychoanalytic theory.”
— Caroline Zilboorg, is the editor of Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters and H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. Among her other books are Transgressions, a historical novel about H.D., and the two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg (Psyche, Psychology and Psychoanalysis and Mind, Medicine and Man)