Selected Critical Writings

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 1998 - Fiction - 365 pages
'A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its complexity and force. To do so, he must be a man of force and complexity himself...' 'A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest.' These comments by D. H. Lawrence are as close a description as any of himself as a critic. They come from his essay on fellow novelist John Galsworthy, and there are many other pieces on novels and novelists in this selection. But Lawrence's range of genres extends to poetry and plays andpaintings, and his critical writing encompasses an enormous variety of subjects, from Aeschylus and the Apocalypse to symbolism and syphilis, for his nterests are philosophical , psychological, religious, moral, sociological, historical and cultural as well as literary and artistic. This selectionis a treasure-trove of 'thought adventures' by one of literature's liveliest critical spirits.

From inside the book

Contents

from Study of Thomas Hardy 1914
9
Poetry of the Present 1922
75
The Spirit of Place 1922
90
Herman Melvilles Typee and Omoo 1922
113
Herman Melvilles Moby Dick 1922
126
The Future of the Novel 1923
142
Review of The Book of Revelation 1924
159
Morality and the Novel 1925
173
Why the Novel Matters 1925
204
Introduction to Mastrodon Gesualdo 1927
223
Review of Four Contemporary Books 1928
243
Introduction to These Paintings 1929
248
Introduction to Pansies 1929
284
Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse 1930
314
Explanatory Notes
327
Index
357

Him With His Tail in His Mouth 1925
191

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About the author (1998)

D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885. His father was a coal miner and Lawrence grew up in a mining town in England. He always hated the mines, however, and frequently used them in his writing to represent both darkness and industrialism, which he despised because he felt it was scarring the English countryside. Lawrence attended high school and college in Nottingham and, after graduation, became a school teacher in Croyden in 1908. Although his first two novels had been unsuccessful, he turned to writing full time when a serious illness forced him to stop teaching. Lawrence spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe, particularly Italy, where he wrote some of his most significant and most controversial novels, including Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who had left her first husband and her children to live with him, spent several years touring Europe and also lived in New Mexico for a time. Lawrence had been a frail child, and he suffered much of his life from tuberculosis. Eventually, he retired to a sanitorium in Nice, France. He died in France in 1930, at age 44. In his relatively short life, he produced more than 50 volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel journals, and letters, in addition to the novels for which he is best known.

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