The Bad Side of Books


Book Description

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emotions; he was a wonderful poet; he was an essayist of burning curiosity, expansive lyricism, odd humor, and radical intelligence, equaled, perhaps, only by Virginia Woolf. Here Geoff Dyer, one of the finest essayists of our day, draws on the whole range of Lawrence’s published essays to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers for whom the essay has become an important genre. We get Lawrence the book reviewer, writing about Death in Venice and welcoming Ernest Hemingway; Lawrence the travel writer, in Mexico and New Mexico and Italy; Lawrence the memoirist, depicting his strange sometime-friend Maurice Magnus; Lawrence the restless inquirer into the possibilities of the novel, writing about the novel and morality and addressing the question of why the novel matters; and, finally, the Lawrence who meditates on birdsong or the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains. Dyer’s selection of Lawrence’s essays is a wonderful introduction to a fundamental, dazzling writer.




D.H. Lawrence


Book Description




Life with a Capital L


Book Description

For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, 'the one bright book of life', yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. This is a selection of his brilliantly varied essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence's thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness and force.




A D.H. Lawrence Handbook


Book Description

Includes information on author and playwright D.H. Lawrence such as a chronology of his life, a chronology of his writings, a checklist of his reading, calendar and maps of his travel, bibliography, filmography, and discography.




D.H. Lawrence


Book Description

Annotation This guide moves beyond the controversy surrounding Lady Chatterley's Lover to examine the prolific output of poetry, novels and non-fiction that made Lawrence a central figure in the Modernist movement.




D. H. Lawrence


Book Description

D.H. Lawrence remains one of the most popular and studied authors of the 20th century. This book is a comprehensive but easy to use reference guide to Lawrence's life, works, and critical reception. The volume has been systematically structured to convey a coherent overall sense of Lawrence's achievement and critical reputation, but it is also designed to enable the reader who may be interested in only one aspect of Lawrence's career, perhaps even in only one of his novels or stories, to find relevant information quickly and easily without having to read other parts of the text. The book begins with an original biography by John Worthen, one of the world's foremost authorities on Lawrence's life and work. The chapters that follow provide separate entries for all of Lawrence's works, except for individual poems and paintings, with critical summaries, discussions of characters, and details of settings. There is also a complete overview of Lawrence and film, with the most complete listing available of film adaptations of his works and of criticism relating to them. Each section of the book provides comprehensive primary and secondary bibliographical data, including citations for the most recent scholarly studies. Maps and chronologies further trace Lawrence's travels and his development over time.




Major Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence


Book Description

First published in 1998. This reference guide is designed for those who would be knowledge able readers of major short stories by D.H. Lawrence when the store of scholarship, investigation, and appraisal is far too vast for all but the expert. An inclusive examination of what has been written about these short stories, each chapter deals with a different short story and consists of five distinct sections: (1) the complete publication history, including all revisions and variants; (2) a thorough examination of recognized and hitherto unrecognized sources, as well as the influences at work on Lawrence in the creation of the story; (3) the story’s relationship to Lawrence’s other writings; (4) acknowledgement and summary of all extant critical studies; and (5) a bibliography of works cited. This study concentrates on six short stories culled from Lawrence’s more than fifty works of short fiction.




D.H. Lawrence


Book Description

Originally published in 1983, D.H. Lawrence is an annotated bibliographic collection of works by and about D.H. Lawrence. Consisting of three parts, the primary bibliography contains separate bibliographies of Lawrence’s major publications, of collection editions of his works, of his letters, and of concordances to his writings. The secondary bibliography contains bibliographies of biographical and critical publications concerning Lawrence, generally or his individual works. Appendixes and Indexes include an extensive checklist of major foreign-language publications concerning Lawrence and a useful topical and thematic subject index for the guide.




D.H. Lawrence


Book Description

The dominant view of D.H. Lawrence's work has long been that of F. R. Leavis, who confined Lawrence within an exclusively ethical and artistic tradition. In D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision, Eugene Goodheart widens the context in which Lawrence should be understood to include European as well as English writers - Blake, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud among others. Goodheart shows that the characteristic impulse of Lawrence's principal discovery was the bodily or physical life that he believed man had once possessed in his pre-civilized past and must now fully recover if future civilized life is possible. Goodheart's argument fully engages the paradoxes of Lawrence's writing. He is at once the last great representative of the moral tradition of the English novel and of the English Protestant imagination and a novelist without precedent, a diabolist in the service of the dark gods. He rejects the claims of society, while simultaneously lamenting the thwarting of the societal instinct. The oppositions and paradoxes in the work are the expression of a single, not always coherent, revolutionary imagination. D.H. Lawrence: The Utopian Vision provides a rigorous and critical analysis of the ideological character of Lawrence's novels and essays, in particular the effect of his utopianism on his views of nature, myth, and religious experience, while responding to his aesthetic achievement. Goodheart's Lawrence is a prophetic artist whose vision is at once inspiring and dangerous. In the new introduction to the book, Goodheart reflects upon the vicissitudes of Lawrence's reputation since the sixties when the book first appeared and his relevance to the concerns of our own time.




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