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Anne Fernihough, ed. The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Pp xx + 292. $54.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
This important collection of essays on Lawrence is a significant addition to the Cambridge Companions to Literature series. Like the other Companions, it aims to appeal to readers across the full range of the academic spectrum, providing undergraduates with a succinct introductory guide to Lawrence's writings and allowing postgraduates and specialist scholars to reflect on the latest developments in the academic study of the author.
Anne Fernihough's admirable introduction outlines the writer's changing critical fortunes from Leavis through Lawrence's New Critical heyday to the feminist attacks and beyond. Fernihough presents Lawrence as having benefited from the recent movement towards interdisciplinary cultural studies in English departments: his complex eclecticism and cultural liminality lend themselves to a critical approach which no longer feels the need to tie up loose ends. The fourteen essays which follow concern themselves in different ways with how Lawrence's writing "crosses lines, between linguistic and social registers, between literary genres and traditions, between whole discourses and disciplines." The contributors largely comprise established Lawrence scholars and those who have come to write on Lawrence through an interest in modernist writings and their cultural and political contexts.
The first section, on "Texts," contains eight essays: the first five are primarily concerned with Lawrence's novels, while the following three consider the tales, the poetry, and Lawrence's engagement with drama and use of the dramatic in his work. In the excellent opening essay, Rick Rylance shows how the perplexity occasioned in the minds of Lawrence's early reviewers by The White Peacock and The Trespasser can be accounted for in part by their author's attempt to negotiate between...