Title: Renewing the normative D.H. Lawrence
First published: 1992
Description: Along with such critics as F.R. Leavis and Harry T. Moore, Mark Spilka helped establish the "normative" D.H. Lawrence of the 1950s, a prophetic artist who tests, explores, and frequently affirms new life-possibilities for love, friendship, and marriage in his finest fiction. Since that time, Spilka has been defending the "normative" Lawrence from changing critical perspectives which have tended to deny or diminish that view of his importance. Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence consists of nine such reconsiderations, written between 1967 and 1990, which directly confront newly controversial issues like Lawrence's anal obsessions, his struggles with tenderness, his hostility toward willful women, his late reaction to his own impotence, his apparent grudge against the clitoris, and his dubious status as an abusive husband - issues that reflect the mounting pressures of the last three decades against any kind of normative claims for Lawrence. These essays are designed, however, to keep those claims alive and well in perilously changing times. In the process, moreover, they help to redefine the prophetic Lawrence's contributions to counterculture movements of the 1960s and to the sexual, feminist, and gay revolutions of recent decades. Throughout the text Spilka deals with Lawrence's struggle toward that creaturely tenderness he was finally able to define. Spilka also relates his own post-New Critical concern with the author's life as an index to his works and with the problematics of biography and culture that the study of such a self-styled prophetic writer entails. In the concluding essays of this collection, Spilka takes up the theme of domestic violence that became the salient form of sexual politics in much of Lawrence's fiction. Spilka's own personal attention to the conception, development, and critical importance of each of the book's nine essays makes Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence a welcome addition to Lawrence studies.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
People: D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
LC classification: PR6023.A93 Z923 1992