D. H. Larence and 'Difference' Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present [Hardcover]

This important study from the prizewinning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a foreigner in the English canon. Focussing on the poetry, Chaudhuri examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their difference. This is the first time that Lawrence's poetry has been discussed in the light of post-colonial and post-structuralist theory; it is also the first time a leading post-colonial writer of his generation has taken as his subject a major canonical English writer, and, through him, remapped the English canon as a site of difference.

Introduction
1. Lawrence's 'Author-God'
2. Intertextuality inBirds, Beasts and Flowers
3. Lawrence's Pictography
4. An Alternative Aesthetic
5. Conclusion: Lawrence's 'Difference' and the Working Class
Bibliography

D.H. Lawrence and 'Difference'succeeds in making us appreciate how much more there is to Lawrence than we know or think we know.... Chaudhuri is excellent on Lawrence's encounter with non-European cultures, as inMornings in Mexico, but also on simplistic attempts to recuperate him as the noble savage of modernism. --David Wheatley,Irish Times

In some superbly original chapters, crafted with the attunement to verbal detail of a practising poet, [Chaudhuri] shows that Lawrence's poems are less framed and finished products than fragments of a larger discourse.... Genuinely groundbreaking and exciting.... This is a poet's criticism, shrewd and deft, full of inside knowledge and technical know-how....D. H. Lawrence and 'Difference'is probably the single best study of Lawrence's poetry to date. --Terry Eagleton,London Review of Books

Through the sheer cumulative force of its carefully nuanced readings, Amit Chaudhuri's argument is wholly convincing. Here is a Lawrence who consistently challenged logocentrism rather than embodying it,lƒo