David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of ...
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David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." The philosopher Bertrand Russell characterised Lawrence as a "proto-German Fascist". Later, the literary critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness. D.H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover, ' which was banned in the United States until 1959. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. (wikipedia.org)
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Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
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It is an excellent work especially noteworthy are the chapters on Poe, Hawthorn and Mellive.
rejoyce
Sep 6, 2007
The Open Road
First published in 1923, Studies in Classic American Literature is exactly that. While history itself has repudiated D.H. Lawrence's notions of a primeval "blood-consciousness"--one cannot possibly entertain those ideas after World War II Axis fascism--this slim volume of essays about Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and others, beginning with the essay, "The Spirit of Place," is filled with an unerring, even telepathic instinct for the true and duplicitous in the work and the country.
Here is Lawrence about "Fenimore Cooper's White Novels": "The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious. . .soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes."
Of course there's a mad sort of mysticism at work in the above passage, yet even reputable historians have noted, for example, Andrew Jackson's penchant for a "regenerative violence" against Native Americans, and Southern writer Eudora Welty has said, "Feelings reside in place." At the least, Lawrence forces the reader to consider whether the dark slaughter of Indians during the westward expansion may haunt the inhabitants and the land itself.
In contrast, the author defines Walt Whitman's message in Leaves of Grass: "The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. . .American democracy where all journey down the open road, and where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. Whitman did away with that. Not by its family name. Not even by its reputation. Whitman and Melville both discounted that. Not by a progression of piety, or by works of Charity. Not by works at all. Not by anything, but just itself. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot and being no more than itself."
To me, this passage is tonic and restorative in its recognition that American democracy consists not of surface appearance, lineage, reputation or good works, but the conjunction of soul meeting soul on "the open road." That seems as apt a definition of our national ideal as any I've read. An essential book of American literary criticism.
