The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts was published in October 2020.

 

It is part of the Edinburgh University Press series which follows the titular format X and the Arts (for example Virginia Woolf [2010], T.S. Eliot [2016], and The First World War [2017]). More broadly, the volume will belong to the series Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities. It is 540 pages long, and contains thirty chapters concerning different aspects of D.H. Lawrence’s relationship to the arts written by  specialists in the relevant fields, including the editors, who will also introduce the volume. Please find elsewhere on this site the editors’ Introduction to this volume, and my chapter on ‘D. H. Lawrence: Icon‘.

 

On Saturday 28th November 2020 a Zoom launch was held to celebrate the publication. This was addressed by guest speakers including the Booker Prize-winning novelist and social commentator Howard Jacobson, the Goldsmiths Professor of English at Oxford University Laura Marcus, and the editor at Edinburgh University Press who commissioned this volume, Jackie Jones. We were also be entertained by some readings from Lawrence’s work from two of the contributors, John Worthen and Keith Cushman. A recording of the event may be found here. My write-up of the event may be found here.

 

Editors

Dr. Catherine Brown, New College of the Humanities, UK

Dr. Susan Reid, University of Northampton, UK (Editor of Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies)

 

The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts has the dual aim of introducing Lawrence relevantly to today’s students, who may be largely unaware of the turbulent history of his reception, and of re-presenting him to experienced readers and scholars who are themselves part of that history. All will be offered a fresh and innovative exploration of Lawrence’s own freshness and innovativeness. Recent international publications suggest a growing interest in modernism and the arts, and an encouraging resurgence of publications on Lawrence in general have also exhibited particular interest in Lawrence and the arts.

 

Back-cover blurb

A detailed assessment of D. H. Lawrence’s wide-ranging engagements across the verbal, visual and performance arts

 

This book includes twenty-eight innovative chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as an artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance, historiography, life writing and queer aesthetics. The Companion presents original research on topics such as Lawrence’s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence’s continuing relevance and aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.

 

Catherine Brown is Head of English and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the New College of the Humanities, London. She is the author of The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (2011), articles on Lawrence, George Eliot, Henry James and Tolstoy, and is the co-editor of The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (2016).

 

Susan Reid is the Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. She is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism (2019) and many articles and book chapters on Lawrence and other modernist writers, and the co-editor of Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011) and Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010-12).

 

 

Key Features

• This is the first comprehensive volume covering D.H. Lawrence’s diverse engagement across the arts..
• Includes 28 specially commissioned chapters on D.H. Lawrence and the arts from well-established and emerging international scholars.
• Builds a picture of Lawrence’s complexity and innovation across the arts, in reinvigorating ways that speak relevantly to the present.

The book includes twenty-eight innovative chapters by specialists from across the arts, reassessing Lawrence’s relationship to aesthetic categories and specific art forms in their historical and critical contexts. A new picture of Lawrence as an artist emerges, expanding from traditional areas of enquiry in prose and poetry into the fields of drama, painting, sculpture, music, architecture, dance, historiography, life writing and queer aesthetics. The Companion presents original research on topics such as Lawrence’s politics in his art, his representations of technology, his practice of revising and rewriting, and the relationship between his criticism and creation of prose, poetry and painting. This interdisciplinary Companion also makes a strong case for Lawrence’s continuing relevance and aesthetic power, as represented by case studies of his afterlives in biofiction, cinema, musical settings and portraiture.

 

Keywords

D.H. Lawrence, philosophy, aesthetics, arts, modernism, literary theory