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Studies in Classic American Literature

Name: Studies in Classic American Literature
Author: D. H. Lawrence
ISBN: 9780140183771

by D. H. Lawrence

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Overview

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature from the previous six years, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Dana, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918-19, but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved.

This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form; it contains the complete surviving 1918-19 text of the essays of the English Review period, including two previously unpublished essay versions; it offers five previously unpublished essays from 1919, as well as a host of other materials (for example, four different versions of Lawrence's pioneering essay on Whitman are included).

Synopsis

“Nobody ever read [the great old books] like Lawrence did—as madly, as wildly or as insightfully. . . . You will be jolted awake.” —A. O. Scott, The New York Times

A Penguin Classic

Lawrence asserted that 'the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it'. In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed 'the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings by such authors as Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Whitman, Lawrence himself has created a classic work. Studies in Classic American Literature is valuable not only for the light it sheds on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American consciousness, telling 'the truth of the day', but also as a prime example of Lawrence's learning, passion and integrity of judgement.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About the Author, D. H. Lawrence

Pensive and insightful, D. H. Lawrence brought to his work a frankness that had been missing from early 20th-century fiction. Though novels such as Lady Chatterly's Lover, Sons and Lovers, and others incited controversy and censorship for their sexual content, Lawrence was not being prurient; he was simply trying to describe the world around him, in both his fiction and his many letters and essays.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"[A] wealth of relevant material for scholars...The Cambridge editors are to be commended for a Herculean labor, for which all those who work on Lawrence owe a huge debt of gratitude." Earl G. Ingersoll, SUNY College at Brockport