D. H. LAWRENCE: SELECTED LITERARY CRITICISM

by Anthony-Ed. Beal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1956

The object of this volume is to gather together in one place, for the first time, all of Lawrence's important writings on literature. Besides passages from his well known Studies in Classic American Literature and from the critical writings collected in Phoenix after his death in 1936, it includes many others from his letters which are pertinent to the editor's project. Roughly outlined, the subjects covered are Puritanism and the Arts, Verse, Contemporaries of Lawrence, and the Importance of the Novel-Continentals- including Italians and Russians, and Americans-including Poe, Melville, Whitman and Hemingway. The whole offers an astonishingly complete view of Lawrence's ethics, to which his critical faculty was almost wholly subordinated. He had a moral standard of his own which might be summed up in the word- ""aliveness"". No author nor book is examined for its own inherent virtue or faults, but appraised by this qualification. Nevertheless for all the rigidity and repetitiousness of Lawrence's castigations, he was too much of an artist not to have some supremely fine insights into the works he is discussing. His ideas about the role of modern man and woman, about obscenity and the use of so-called obscene words, his disdain for neurotics and renegades, all this is well-known. But the keenness of his perceptions in certain instances, primarily of Hardy's work, Melville and Hemingway, are well worth reading. This book will be a delight to all Lawrence devotees; it will interest and be a convenience to scholars, and a few of its sections will take their place among the best literary criticism of our period.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1956

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1956

Categories: NONFICTION