Studies in Classic American Literature (Shearsman Classics) - Softcover

Studies in Classic American Literature [...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the relationship between the Old World and the New, a new theory of the self, a theory of textuality (and a fearless demonstration of a radical, self-styled form of psycho-social criticism), a theory of art, a history of America, a critique of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest covert autobiographies in world literature (all the writers in the book represent either versions of Lawrence's self or versions of himself he felt he had to liberate). And, of course, it is a bravura interpretation of "classic" American texts, one of the most innovative and penetrating critical performances of modern times. -from Jon Thompson's Introduction.

D.H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottingham in 1895, to a father who was a miner and a mother who was a home-based lace-worker. After beginnings as a teacher, Lawrence's work was taken up by Ford Madox Ford and others, and he made a significant mark as a novelist and as a writer of short stories. Often steeped in controversy because of his frank treatment of sexuality, but also because of his elopement with another man's wife-a German national-just before World War 1, Lawrence eventually was to spend many years in voluntary exile in continental Europe, and then in Mexico and the U.S.A. Famous in the wider world for novels such as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and the scandal-struck Lady Chatterley's Lover, he wrote over 800 poems, and several collections of short stories and volumes of essays. He was also an accomplished painter. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, in the south of France, in 1930.