D. H. Lawrence: Selected Short Stories

This book provides a stimulating and carefully structured introduction to Lawrence’s short stories. It guides the reader to a deeper critical understanding of individual stories, but it also provides model commentaries on several of their most prominent narrative techniques. Part 1 provides an overview of Lawrence’s work in the genre, discussing his early realist stories, the modernist tales, and the late fables and satires. Part 2 contains a thorough analysis of ten of Lawrence’s best known and most widely studied stories (‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, ‘Daughters of the Vicar’, ‘Love Among the Haystacks’, ‘The Prussian Officer’, ‘England, My England’, ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’, ‘The Blind Man’, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, and ‘Things’). The analysis includes details of composition, a detailed synopsis, plus a short focus on a critical issue which opens up the structure of the story in question. Part 3 uses sections from four of the stories to demonstrate Lawrence’s use of dialogue, symbolism, free indirect discourse, and mimicry and satire. Part 4 presents a Select Bibliography of editions of the stories plus secondary criticism. Andrew Harrison lectures in English Literature at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. He has published numerous articles on D. H. Lawrence, and is the author of D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism (2003), co-editor (with John Worthen) of a casebook of modern critical essays on Sons and Lovers (2005), and author of the Humanities Insights e-book on Sons and Lovers. He edits the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. "Excellent ... It deserves wide circulation as an introduction to the study of Lawrence's short fiction and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to both A level and undergraduate students." Peter Preston