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April ³Jack Stewart¹s 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 Œhinterlands of the soul¹ that lie behind expression. He compels new awareness of the baffling complexity of Lawrence¹s mature work, frequently using but also transcending the work of earlier commentators.²‹Michael Squires, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University D. H. Lawrence, asserts Jack Stewart, expresses a painter¹s vision in words, supplementing visual images with verbal rhythms. With the help of twenty-three illustrations, Stewart shows how Lawrence¹s style relates to impressionism, expressionism, primitivism, and futurism. Stewart examines Lawrence¹s painterly vision in The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. While many critics find Georgian pastoralism in The White Peacock, Stewart finds the influence of modernist aesthetics, from Beardsley¹s erotic drawings to the use of urban impressionism Lawrence draws upon in the London scenes. Critics stress Lawrence¹s masterful realism in Sons and Lovers, but as Stewart demonstrates, that realism is increasingly supplemented by impressionism, symbolism, and even expressionism. In that novel, Lawrence presents reality through an objective style that interacts with subjective modes to sustain an expressive image of life. In The Rainbow, Lawrence advances beyond realism to a new style that, with violent projections of ³soul-states² and distortions of natural imagery, parallels expressionism in the visual arts. Stewart also explores three art movements in Women in Love: expressionism, primitivism, and futurism. The final three chapters deal with the influence exerted on Lawrence¹s fiction by the work of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. Stewart concludes by synthesizing the themes that pervade this interarts study: vision and expression, art and ontology. Jack Stewart is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock and the coeditor of Michael Bullock: Selected Works, 19361996. |
"I found myself consistently enlightened by Crusius's discussions. By locating Burke's concerns within philosophical thought, Crusius takes us to the heart of Burke's project and contributes mightily to the resolution of many Burkean problems. By taking a philosophical approach, Crusius is able to claim substantial new territory. This study is impressive, original, and important." —Jack Selzer, author of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931
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