The First And Second Lady Chatterley Novels

This 1999 book contains a critical edition of the two early versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Although love and sex are central to Lawrence, critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the way these two topics are treated in his work. Reasons for this are suggested in the preface to this book which is written in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s claim that, when we are puzzled or challenged by a phenomenon, we should be less concerned with seeking new knowledge than putting into order what we already know. Yet those concerned by the present dip in Lawrence’s reputation (among academics, if not the general public) have to be worried by how strange and unexpected the results are when Lawrence’s dealings with love and sex are followed throughout his life and career. This is what this book undertakes to do, describing how the tortuous developments in his relationship with Jessie Chambers are reflected in his writing, his struggle against his undoubted leanings towards homosexuality, the war he declared on the concept of romantic love and how, after insisting on the idea of male dominance, he returned (although only in part) to a more humane vision of relations between the sexes in the various versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Its aim is to suggest that although Lawrence is undoubtedly a major writer, his greatest achievements are not to be found where he is popularly assumed to be at his most impressive and that the authority he assumes, in his last years, when he lectures the young on love and sex, ought to be regarded as dubious.

"In this study of the Lady Chatterley novels, Masami Nakabayashi pays particular attention to D.H. Lawrence's language for the feelings and for the life of the unselfconscious, sexual body. The novels constantly find ways of verbalising the characters' internalised experiences as they occur in states of unselfconsciousness. Lawrence's language for sensual feelings and emotions has always been regarded as simply 'sexual' and no previous critics have explored or made sense of the complexities of his peculiar, but extremely sophisticated, writing practice in the Lady Chatterley novels. Lawrence was a habitual reviser of his work, and, despite the availability of reliable texts in the Cambridge edition, few critics have traced the nature and significance of his changes from one draft to the next. By examining and analysing the novels' particular linguistic revisions, Masami Nakabayashi reveals the textual impulse behind Lawrence's original conception and its subsequent change and development"--Back cover.

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works. In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success – a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows. Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.

This pre-eminent bibliography for D. H. Lawrence was extensively revised, updated and expanded by Paul Poplawski for publication in 2001.

The Cambridge edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover') is the first ever to restore to Lawrence's most famous novel the words that he wrote. It removes typists' corruptions and compositors' errors, which have marred the text for over sixty years, and includes hundreds of new words, phrases and sentences - and thousands of changes in punctuation. This text projects the sound of Lawrence's voice, embodies the precision of his mature style and reveals the force of his rhetorical power. The introduction establishes an accurate history of composition, typing, printing, publication and reception; the notes freshly identify dozens of difficult allusions; and the appendix, an original essay, explains how Lawrence imaginatively weaves real places and people into the fictional tapestry that he creates. For students and scholars alike, the Cambridge text is the only text of the novel that can be read or quoted with confidence.