Anne Fernihough - Böcker

With its frank portrayal of human passion and sexual desire, D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow was banned as 'obscene' in Britain shortly after first publication. Set in the rural Midlands, The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than 60 years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow, Lydia Lensky, and adopts her daughter Anna as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupts between them. All are seeking individual fulfilment, but it is Ursula, Anne's spirited daughter, who in her search for self-knowedge, becomes the focus of Lawrence's examination of relationships and the conflicts they bring, and the inextricable mingling of the physical and the spiritual. Suffused with Biblical imagery, The Rainbow addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid detail.In his introduction James Wood discusses Lawrence's writing style and the tensions and themes of The Rainbow. This Penguin edition reproduces the Cambridge text, which provides a text as close as possible to Lawrence's original. It also includes suggested further reading, a fragment of 'The Sisters II' from his first draft, and chronologies of Lawrence's life and of The Rainbow's Brangwen family.Edited with an introduction by James Wood. 'A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious'Independent on Sunday

The vast body of Lawrence scholarship has veered between the extremes of uncritical celebration and violent denigration. This first extended study of Lawrence's aesthetics draws on a number of modern critical approaches to present an original and balanced analysis of Lawrence's literary and art criticism, and of the complex cultural context from which it emerged.Emphasising the influence on this most`English' of writers of a German intellectual and cultural heritage, Anne Fernihough focuses on Lawrence's connections with the völkisch ideologies prevalent in Germany from 1910-1930, from which both Heideggerian philosophy and Nazism emerged. The deep-seated affinities between Lawrentian and Heideggerian aesthetics are examined for the first time, and the author highlights Lawrence's `green' critique of industrialization. New light is shed on Lawrence's hostility towards Freud, contrasting the two writers' thinking on art and the unconscious. The book's reassessment of Lawrence's relationship with Bloomsbury opposes the received view that Lawrence and the Bloomsbury art critics were poles apart.This fascinating and lucid study reveals Lawrence's art criticism as pluralistic and anti-authoritarian, a necessary antidote to his sometimes brutally authoritarian politics and to the dogma and rigidity that pervades so many other areas of Lawrence's thought.

Freewomen and Supermen adds to the comparatively recent body of research which has sought to re-evaluate the literature and culture of the 'long' Edwardian period (1900-1914). It singles out the editors of two of the most important magazines for the history of modernism, Dora Marsden, editor of the Freewoman (later renamed the New Freewoman and then the Egoist) and A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age. Together with other editors such as Emma Goldman in America, Marsden and Orage fostered an optimistic, colourful, aube-de-siècle culture to rival the fin-de-siècle culture of the preceding decade. Their magazines were interdisciplinary in approach, with articles on literature and philosophy appearing alongside discussions of such matters as anarchism, eugenics, suffragism, suburban architecture, vegetarianism, and the 'intermediate sex'. Anne Fernihough argues that the often extreme positions adopted amongst 1900s radicals on both sides of the Atlantic were a response to a period of political turmoil and startling demographic and technological change. Their radicalism impacted in its turn on a wide range of literary forms, contents and theories, and continued to so beyond the First World War and into the 'high modernist' period. The book discusses both British and American writers across different genres, including Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Upton Sinclair, Rebecca West, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Tressell, and Gertrude Stein. Other cultural figures discussed include the sexologists Otto Weininger and Edward Carpenter, and the diet-reformer, Horace Fletcher. The film and television industries have often capitalised on a nostalgic vision of the Edwardian, but Freewomen and Supermen emphasises the more embattled aspects of Edwardian culture such as anarchism, suffragism, eugenics and food-reform, and shows how Edwardian radical thought was to play a crucial role in the development of literary modernism.

The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence contains fourteen chapters by leading international scholars. They offer a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most important and controversial writers of the twentieth century. These specially-commissioned essays offer diverse and stimulating readings of Lawrence's major novels, short stories, poetry and plays, and place Lawrence's writing in a variety of literary, cultural, and political contexts, such as modernism, sexual and ethnic identity, and psychoanalysis. The concluding chapter addresses the vexed history of Lawrence's critical reception throughout the twentieth century. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading.