Abstract
Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)1 is Lawrence’s most significant entry into the American literary imagination. The essays on Franklin, Dana, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman may be read as fictions of criticism, reinventions of the classic figures of American literature according to the imperatives of Lawrence’s own imagination. Studies is a sort of fable about the Americanization of the European colonizers.
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Notes
Earlier versions of Studies in Classic American Literature were collected under the title The Symbolic Meaning, ed. Armin Arnold, with a preface by Harry Moore (London, 1962).
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1924), p. 56.
Tony Tanner, The City of Words (New York, 1971).
Edward Dahlberg and Herbert Read, Truth Is More Sacred (New York, 1961), p. 102.
D. H. Lawrence, “An Introduction to Bottom Dogs,” Edward Dahlberg: American Ishmael of Letters, ed. Harold Billings (Austin, 1968), p. 46.
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York, 1925), p. 154.
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (London, 1983), p. 80.
Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (New York, 1951), p. 192.
Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter (New York, 1925), p. 145.
Joseph Foster, D. H. Lawrence in Taos (Albuquerque, 1972), p. 185.
By resistance I do not mean a strategy of disarmament which dismisses his prophetic role and simply affirms the artist. For instance, Saul Bellow discounts The Plumed Serpent, politically and morally his most offensive novel, and embraces The Lost Girl, an admirable but not very original novel. (Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, Third Series, ed. George Plimpton, London, 1965, p. 182.) I suspect that the real motive for Bellow’s resistance to Lawrence is not Lawrence’s spiritual-prophetic character, but the quasi-fascistic doctrine of The Plumed Serpent. I can think of no contemporary American writer whose work has a spiritual ambition as powerful as Bellow’s.
Evelyn Hinz and John Teunissen, Introduction to Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence (Santa Barbara, 1980), p. 15.
Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York, 1963), p. 182.
Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (Boston, 1971), p. 136.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1970), p. 295.
Bernard Malamud, Dubin’s Lives (New York, 1980), p. 182.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London, 1980), p. 448.
D. H. Lawrence, “America, Listen to Your Own,” Phoenix, ed. Edward McDonald (New York, 1936), p. 90.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York, 1961), p. 88.
Tennessee Williams, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (New York, 1951), p. 17.
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© 1987 Eugene Goodheart
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Goodheart, E. (1987). Lawrence and American Fiction. In: Meyers, J. (eds) The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08308-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08308-4_7
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