Description
Book Synopsis"Terra Incognita": D. H. Lawrence at the Frontiers consists of nine essays by scholars from five countries. They show how Lawrence explored the "terra incognita" not only of geography but also of consciousness and human relations. The 1920s emerge as a watershed in his work. These essays present the first criticism to utilize new texts and research in the final prose volumes of the Cambridge Lawrence Edition. This includes all the essays Lawrence wrote in America about Southwestern and Mexican Indians (Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, 2009). Authors are Michael Hollington, Paul Poplawski, Judith Ruderman, Edina Pereira Crunfli, Jack Stewart, Keith Cushman, Tina Ferris, Julianne Newmark, and Hyde. Color illustrations are by Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Dorothy Brett. The book will interest both general readers and scholars of Lawrence and twentieth-century literature.
Trade ReviewSatisfying and cohesive, the essays in this volume focus on metaphorical and literal ideas of frontiers (as distinguished from borders, which many of the contributors consider limiting and disabling rather than flexible and generative). Taken together, the essays suggest that, for Lawrence, every literal frontier experience was a metaphorical one that enabled fruitful if also fraught encounters with otherness. Most essays focus on Lawrence's time in the American Southwest and Mexico in 1922-25. Among the topics are Lawrence's (reluctant) involvement in a campaign to help the Pueblo people in their struggle for land and water rights; his relationship to artists like Dorothy Brett and Georgia O'Keefe, who painted the southwestern landscape; his changing attitudes to the ceremonial dances of the Pueblo people; and his (well-intentioned but perhaps failed) reversal of the Christian conversion enterprise in The Plumed Serpent. This book provides a valuable reexamination of a misunderstood period in Lawrence's life. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- D. Stuber, Hendrix College * CHOICE, April 2011 *
