Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D.H. Lawrence - Hardcover

Kushigian, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820412082 ISBN 13: 9780820412085

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 1990

Synopsis

D.H. Lawrence wanted to write a new kind of fiction. To do so, he turned to the images and aesthetic ideas of visual artists. Pictures and Fictions is the first full-length study to explore the nature of Lawrence's early intellectual and stylistic debt to the Italian Futurists, to 19th century English arts and crafts, botanical drawing, aestheticism, and genre painting, and to early Germanic expressionism. Drawing on both published and unpublished texts, the author discusses The White Peacock within its West Midlands industrial setting, tracing the formative influence on Lawrence of his board school training, where drawing and empirical method were conceptually tied. Through close textual analysis the study proposes that Sons and Lovers may be read as a Künstlerroman, and that there and in The Rainbow Lawrence uses a pictorial method that radically influences our critical interpretations by presenting visual subtexts that sometimes reinforce, but sometimes contradict verbal narrative.

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Review:

«In this very useful book Nancy Kushigian has articulated precisely and comprehensively what has formerly been only a vague critical observation about D.H. Lawrence's poetics. It has not been sufficient to hear about Lawrence's powers of visual description; what we have needed is a thorough analysis of his involvement with contemporary art movements, his experimental application of Expressionist and Futurist theories and practice to narrative structure, and his strategies of rendering characterization, landscape, and dramatic action, page by page, in pictorial terms. Now we have such a capacious study. Admirers of 'Sons and Lovers' and 'The Rainbow', especially, will learn more about Lawrence's innovative methods by consulting this well-written and well-researched account of Lawrence's early career.» (Laurence Goldstein, The University of Michigan)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0820412082
• ISBN 13: 9780820412085
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 178