Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Progress Book

Along with such critics as F.R. Leavis and Harry T. Moore, Mark Spilka helped establish the "normative" 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 wilful 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 changing times. In the process, moreover, they aim to help redefine Lawrence's contributions to counterculture movements of the 1960s and to the sexual, feminist and gay revolutions of recent decades. Spilka's attention to the conception, development, and critical importance of each of the book's nine essays, is intended to make "Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence" a useful addition to Lawrence studies.Read More