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31:3 Book Reviews reader must dig that information out of the notes and lengthy textual apparatus (thirty-four pages in this volume) in the back. Worthen's expert notes elucidate various biographical, historical, verbal, and textual details. He is a man who understands how a turn-of-the-century English coal mine operated. The volumes in the Critical Heritage series bring together essays and reviews about major authors during their lifetimes. Such contemporary critical commentary offers insight into a writer's relationship with his reading public. Furthermore, the essays and reviews always seem to demonstrate that the standard critical positions about a writer began to take shape quite early. This is the fourth edition of the Lawrence volume. The back of the title-page succinctly and somewhat ambiguously informs us that the book was "reprinted with conections in 1979 and 1986," conections that are nowhere identified. The book's main problem is that 330 pages can't begin to do justice to such a prolific writer. R. P. Draper's Introduction helps, but one can only wish the General Editor had accorded Lawrence the same two-volume treatment he allowed for Joyce. It's also disappointing that the volumes in the Critical Heritage series never provide a list of the many contemporary reviews—in Lawrence's case hundreds—that do not make it into the book. For $65, that does not seem a lot to ask. Keith Cushman University of North Carolina at Greensboro TWO ON LAWRENCE Diane S. Bonds. Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987. $39.95 Jeffrey Meyers, ed. The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. $25.00 In a recent review for ELT, Daniel Schwarz argues that cunent Lawrence criticism is "nanowly focused and modest" and asks for "major critical works on Lawrence from some of our powerful critics" (30: 2[1987], 248). For different reasons, neither of the two books here under review satisfies Schwarz's call, but both suggest—one more powerfully than the other—the direction that such new work may take. The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, is a study by several distinguished critics—John B ay ley, William Chace, Roberts French, James Gindin, Eugene Goodheart, Kingsley Widmer, Meyers himself—of Lawrence's influence on English and American fiction, poetry, and travel writers. Given the ambition of its editor, the quality of its contributors, and the powerful pronouncements that some of these contributors have made in the past, the collection surprises : it is yet one more example of the nanowly focused, modest criticism that Schwarz regrets. The study's limitations come from two different but 355 31:3 Book Reviews related reasons—the conception of the book, including its conception of influence , and the assumptions about Lawrence on which it is built. Meyers has defined the task of studying influence chronologically and generically : therefore Chapter 1 (by Bayley) is "Lawrence and the Modem EngUsh Novel"; Chapter 2 (by Gindin), "Lawrence and the Contemporary English Novel," and so on. For the most part, the chapters themselves are in tum organized sequentially, treating a series of authors influenced by Lawrence in order of their publication dates. Meyers's own chapter, for example, is divided into nine sections, seven of which provide brief summaries of the work of seven travel writers who, Meyers argues, were influenced by Lawrence "in different ways" (107). The lack of rigor in that conclusion is hardly surprising, given that no single writer is considered for more than five pages. The definition of influence leads to similarly superficial treatment. For Meyers and for most of his critics, influence is demonstrated by such characteristics as the trivial allusion (a man named Mellors gives George Bowling a racing tip in Coming Up for Air [6]), the testimonial (W. H. Auden called Lawrence "one of my Uterary heroes" [2]), the biographical reference (reading Lady Chatterley's Lover changed Norman Mailer's sex life [H]), the similar plot (David Storey's Saville is "the long, slow, painstaking development of the sensitive miner's son" [45]), or—most frequently—the shared theme (Ted Hughes is Lawrencean "in...

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