Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature – serie

Based on the Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's letters and works, this is a systematic study of his neglected early novels and short stories. He places Lawrence in a new light as an artist, especially considering the relationship between his art and thought.

Philip Larkin and English Poetry is a practical criticism of Larkin's poetry which discusses the poet's views on poetry as they are made visible in his prose writings and his interviews, Larkin's affinities with a series of other English poets (including Dr Samuel Johnson, D.H.

This second volume of the author's commentary on Lawrence's prose-works concentrates on the sequence of non-fictional texts written between 1913 and 1917, namely the "Foreword" to "Sons and Lovers", "Study of Thomas Hardy", "Twilight in Italy", "The Crown" and "The Reality of Peace". In all of them Lawrence was compulsively rewriting what he called "my philosophy". They are difficult works, highly metaphorical, in places prophetically expressionist, even surreal.;This extended commentary attempts to make sense of them, treating them as a succession of experimental writings which support each other, develop non-discursive modes of writing, and are linked by shared metaphors which reveal shared preoccupations. The analysis which enters them most usefully is like the close reading of poetry.;An introductory Part 1 looks back to the early fiction treated in the first volume, to show how the young Lawrence was always preoccupied with a sense of being, of individual plenitude or flowering, of being part of a world which invites a religious response. Lawrence's youthful religious doubts were resolved neither by conventional faith nor by conventional positivism or scientism.The philosophi

In this combined critical study and biography of Wilfred Owen, the author traces his poetic interests and developments and analyzes a number of the later poems. Hibberd based his research on Owen's surviving papers and books. The book is concentrates on three topics: Owen's sexual nature and experience, the consonance between certain recurrent motifs of Decadent literature and recurrent features of Owen's psychic life and the question of Owen's behaviour as a soldier. In each area Hibbert studied the source material for new insights. He discusses the significance for Owen's poetry of many little known elements in his life and shows how Owen's war poems grew out of his earlier verse, presenting it as a culmination rather than rejection of his allegiance to Romanticism. In Hibbert's readings of Owen's work eg "Spring Offensive", he combines close textual analysis with relevant matters from Owen's biography and in addition, he sheds light on other people and events of the period.