The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence Vision and Expression Jack Stewart   December 2000 280 pages | 23 illus. | 6 x 9 0-8093-2388-5, $29.50, paper 0-8093-2168-1, $42.00, cloth Literature “Jack Stewart makes a good case for Lawrence’s adoption of myriad expressive forms. His study explores the vital visual element in Lawrence’s work and his empathy with the prevalent artistic movements of his time. . . . Stewart’s approach is compelling. He places Lawrence in a rich cultural and intellectual mileu, and his close reading of the fiction for reverberations with the visual arts yields fresh insights.” —D. H. Lawrence Review   “Stewart focuses on Lawrence’s attraction to nineteenth-century aestheticism and decadence (particularly Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome), futurism, realism, symbolism, primitivism, African and Japanese art, as well as the work of  such painters as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin. [He] offers sensitive discussions of The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Plumed Serpent, which provide evidence of Lawrence’s crucial role in the development of modernism.” —Choice   “Jack Stewart’s book will prove stimulating to Lawrence scholars and critics, advanced students, and sophisticated general readers. Exploring the boundaries shared by literature and painting, his book seeks to uncover the ‘hinterlands of the soul’ that lie behind expression. He compels new awareness of the baffling complexity of Lawrence’s mature work, frequently using but also transcending the work of earlier commentators. Indeed, his prose style is among the most intelligible I have encountered in academic discourse.” —Michael Squires, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University   D. H. Lawrence, asserts Jack Stewart, expresses a painter’s vision in words, supplementing visual images with verbal rhythms. With the help of twenty-three illustrations, Stewart examines Lawrence’s painterly vision in The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. He concludes by synthesizing the themes that pervade this interarts study: vision and expression, art and ontology.   Jack Stewart is a professor emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia and a member of the editorial board of the D. H. Lawrence Review. He has contributed numerous essays on Lawrence, Woolf, Durrell, Murdoch, and other twentieth-century authors to scholarly journals. Specializing in interrelationships between literature and painting in the modern period, he is the author of The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock and coeditor of Michael Bullock: Selected Works, 1936-1996.