Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in Classic American Literature, first published in 1923, provides a cross-section of Lawrence’s writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Eight of the essays were first published in the English Review 1918–19; but Lawrence continued to work on his material, with the aim of producing a full-length book; at various times fifteen separate items belonged to it, all of them revised on different occasions, some of them four or five times, and often corrected with the errors of their predecessors preserved. This volume offers the final 1923 version of the text in a newly corrected and uncensored form, and the complete surviving text of the essays of the English Review period, as well as a host of other materials, including four different versions of Lawrence’s pioneering essay on Whitman.

• Lawrence’s landmark writings on American literature made available for the first time in many years • The first scholarly edition of a book of major writings of D. H. Lawrence • Includes some fascinating, previously unpublished writing by Lawrence, on homosexuality and other matters

General editor’s preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Cue-titles; Introduction; Studies in Classic American Literature: final version (1923), first version (1918–19), intermediate version (1919); Appendices 1. Reading notes for The Scarlet Letter; 2. Foreword to Studies in Classic American Literature (1920); 3. Foreword (1922), 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1920–1); 5. XIII.Whitman (1921–2); 6. XIII.Whitman (1922); Explanatory notes; Textual apparatus; Variorum apparatus; A note on pounds, shillings and pence; Index.

‘… excellently produced …’. The Use of English

‘… a brilliant and necessary book because it opens up familiar texts, reminding us that the best literary criticism is always in the end both evaluative and engaged.’ Times Literary Supplement

\'… an excellently edited book, with a detailed, informative and scholarly introduction, and very helpful annotations. I think the greatest merit of this edition is that it also includes the English Review articles, together with their different versions, published or unpublished.\' English Studies