Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
10 - Veering with Lawrence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
Summary
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman.
(Henry Thoreau)Literature is perhaps essentially … a power of contestation.
(Maurice Blanchot)Nothing in the ‘western literary canon’ is solid and unshifting, starting with the ‘western’ and the ‘literary’ themselves. Even the most apparently settled and established figures (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Dostoevsky or Proust, for example) slide and twist about, depending on a kaleidoscopic mix of factors – from singularly influential readings of the writer's oeuvre, life or historical context to the vaguer but no less imposing influence of cultural and intellectual trends. The flows that constitute ‘influence’ are never smooth or uni-directional.
What has happened to D. H. Lawrence? And how should we read him today?
Over the decades his reputation has veered. Anne Fernihough's phrase is ‘see-sawed’, but that suggests a sort of regulated up and down or backwards and forwards. Lawrence's reputation has veered – from the days of F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (in which Lawrence's name seems written in the stars) to the great put-down initiated by Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), and thereafter into the politically correct pastures of a sort of hazy and complacent disregard. The reputation of Lawrence's work can never return to what it was, when the canon of ‘literature in English’ was primarily a gathering of dead white men and there was little or no critical reflection on questions of misogyny or the dominance of ‘phallic consciousness’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- VeeringA Theory of Literature, pp. 177 - 209Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011