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. Lawrence and the Imagists, and Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and R.S. Thomas) which have been overlooked by previous critics are referred to, and Terry Whalen provides close readings of the individual poems that will appeal to both the first-time reader of Larkin's works and those who are seasoned readers of England's finest poet. Whalen stresses the depth and integrity of the `other' Larkin, the poet of beauty and of witness who explores the world of observation with a hunger for meaning and a sense of wonder which earlier reviewers and critics have tended to ignore.

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 first full critical study of Owen for 25 years, and the first ever to be based on research into all his surviving papers and books, Dominic Hibberd discusses the significance for his poetry of many scarcely known elements in his life: his battle with Revivalism; his discovery of the French Decadence; his alleged cowardice; his shellshock and its treatment; his homosexuality and his friendship with Oscar Wilde's followers. This is likely to be the most authoritative book on its subject for many years to come.